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2008-11-27
The upside of SMS


November 27, 2008 by Marcus Anderson

Look, the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes!

Some of you are no doubt familiar with this line taken from “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a story published in 1837 by the Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen.

In the plot, the emperor, an overly proud man, hires two swindlers to weave him what they promise to be the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they tell him, is invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position.

The emperor cannot see the (non-existent) cloth, but pretends that he can for fear of appearing unfit for his role; his ministers do the same.

When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they pretend to dress him. The naked emperor then proceeds through the capital showing off his new "clothes" which all his subjects pretend to admire.

During the course of the procession, a small child blurts out the truth at which point the crowd, realizing the child is, in fact, right erupts into a mighty roar of laughter.

As an advocate of the most effective and efficient mode of mobile marketing, text messaging, I often feel like I too am crying out the truth to an audience that will neither listen nor open their eyes to see.

One of my roles within our company is to engage with potential investors and their armies of financial advisors about SMS, championing it as the most underutilized and effective marketing channel, mobile or otherwise.

In this pursuit I am often confronted with statements like:

Everybody will have BlackBerries, PDAs or smartphones by this time next year. This is not true.

Numerous reports forecast that the penetration of high-end handsets (mobile-browser-enabled) will reach no more than 50 percent of the market before 2013 (2012 at the earliest).

Mobile data fees are continually coming down in price. This will render SMS redundant as everybody will have mobile email available at all times.

This also is not true.

While data plans are definitely decreasing, they are still many times more expensive than the all-you-can-eat text messaging bundles that are offered by all the major carriers.

Text messaging is cool for teenagers, allowing them to communicate amongst themselves but is not a method that business can use to connect with their customers. Again, not true.

In foreign markets across Europe and Asia, where the mobile Internet experience is just as mature as it is in North America, if not more so, text messaging flourishes as a parallel business-to-consumer communication channel

Advertisers will not pay a premium for text based ads. Well, Google has made billions of dollars in online click-through revenues based almost entirely on text-based ads.

In the cellular market, where people can be targeted even more specifically, this will not present a problem.

Useful messages cannot be delivered in 160 characters or less. That statement took 65 characters.

My response – only an additional 39.

Many of the investors I speak with seem to concentrate their focus on the promise of the mobile Internet experience. Their advisors spin this channel as the best and only answer to marketers’ need to reach the lucrative mobile audience.

While without a doubt there are many companies creating exciting applications that will enhance the rich graphical experience delivered by the iPhone, BlackBerry and other smartphones, and will reap huge returns on investment in the process, many tall tales exist about the universal effectiveness of these applications today.

The flip side of the mobile marketing landscape is that communicating through text messaging, a proven and popular technology, also presents a worthwhile opportunity with huge upside.

Marketing 101 – “go where the customers are” – should lead marketers to the realization that customers are text messaging in abundance.

The enthusiastic embrace of text messaging by millions of youth, themselves the consumers and technology leaders of the future, is proof-positive that those marketers who refuse to deliver services using this channel will do themselves a disservice, while those who do will end up with the last laugh.

The youth, like the little boy in the story, are seeing more clearly than the rest of us.

Marcus Anderson is president of Broadplay, a Toronto, Ontario-based interactive and mobile marketing agency. Reach him at manderson @broadplay.com.


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