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Harnessing the Power of SMS Text Messaging

The Power of Interactivity

Consider a typical brand manager’s media budget for brand building. It used to be that 100% would be spent on broadcasting messages across traditional media — print, radio, television and out-of-home. This open-ended communication lacked any interactivity or dialog with people. However, now the largest growing media spend is the Internet – but why? Because it’s interactive. Your audience engages directly with you — with a simple click. Now the wealth of knowledge built by direct marketers using direct response (DR) marketing techniques has become relevant to all advertisers, including brand builders. And it’s widely accepted that if you interact with your constituency, your communication is much more likely to meet your marketing objectives. The Internet has changed branding forever.

Out-of-home advertising has yet to fully leverage this level of interactivity. There are direct marketers that have invested in call center assets who post phone numbers to “call now” in their creative, but these tend to be brands that can execute a transaction and monetize the call. Also, many advertisers post the URL to their web sites on signs, but this does little more than tell a consumer that there is an online presence that they can ’Google’ for later since it is rare they can actually stop and write down a long web address.

Since people on the go typically do not have the time to have an extensive dialog with a call center agent, nor do they have the time to remember a web or email address, there has been little interactivity in out-of-home brand advertising. Some envision a day when Bluetooth technology transmits messages from signs to people’s handsets that they can respond to, but this has proven slow as consumers have not opted into this type of interaction due to privacy and nuisance concerns.

So what’s different now?

The answer is SMS or text messaging.

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