Text Is Ugly but Where the Volume Is

The numbers are all over the place but MediaPost reports (reg. req’d) that the Mobile Marketing Assn. found 70% of US consumers do text messaging:

In the study, which surveyed 1,800 consumers ages 13 to 65 years old, 48% said their wireless phone usage has increased significantly over the last year. Text-messaging was the most popular feature, with nearly 70% having used it.

Other recent surveys from M:Metrics and comScore have found 36% and 50% of US consumers using text messaging.

This is clearly where the data volume is, not the “mobile Internet” (which nonetheless has 30-34 million users in the US). So the majority of mobile marketing in the near term will probably be tied into text-related ads and promotions. One benefit of this is that they can connect traditional media and mobile marketing fairly easily.

A secondary benefit is that marketers can use text-based mobile marketing to track the efficacy of other media (much as you can with search online).

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