With Short Message Service (SMS) marketing on the upswing, one promotion has gained notoriety as an interactive TV tie-in success story.
The hit series, American Idol broadcast on Fox, received more than 2.5 million text messages as of April 8. Viewers used their wireless phones to participate in on-air polls, to enter sweepstakes, to answer trivia questions or to vote for their favorite contestant.
Close to 1,000 text messages per second were recorded at one point during the voting period, according to wireless media company Mobliss, Seattle, which provided the text message voting and other capabilities to AT&T wireless subscribers.
“Thanks to American Idol, a lot of brand marketers are trying to use text messaging as another way to interact with their customers,” Brian Levin, CEO of Mobliss, said yesterday.
Messaging applications are expected to generate $2 billion in revenues by 2005, compared to $531 million in 2002, according to a recent report by Morgan Stanley. And the number of U.S. wireless subscribers has grown 9.7% year over year, to 144.2 million in 2003.
Even with the success of the American Idol promotion, Marian Salzman, chief strategic officer, Euro RSCG Worldwide, New York City, said that most American marketers lag behind their European counterparts when it comes to integrating SMS marketing into the mix.
“In the states, the verb to text has finally been introduced into our day-to-day marketing lexicon,” Salzman said. “‘I’ll text you’, that’s kind of a benchmark. When things like that become part of our everyday verbiage we start to feel differently. The ubiquitous phone, with people thumbing conversations is going to be a part of life.”
Salzman said SMS will eventually be layered onto every marketing campaign, but that it will take time for marketers in this country to get comfortable with SMS.
“We need to study what’s working and what’s not,” she said.
What is working is targeting young people. “Young people really embraced the technology earlier, they have learned to speak with their thumbs,” Salzman said.
She cautioned against bombarding people with silly messages and too many jokes and to keep the messages actionable. “It’s important to remember that what to one person seems like slang is to another person rude,” she said. “We have to be careful we don’t overdo the hip and coolness.”
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