The survey, carried out by research group, Netsurvey and UK mobile marketing specialist, Mediatude, polled 5000 subscribers in a two-month test in Sweden. In return, subscribers were given subsidised SMS services, offering news and information with advertising attached.
"For the IT manager it presents the chance to offer the financial director his dream -Â mobile marketing's closest medium to a direct marketing tool which is measurable and offers real-time assessment of the advertising campaign," said Heidi Hutchison, chief marketing officer for Mediatude.
Roughly one-fifth of the 5,000 trialists responded, of whom 76 percent said they considered SMS information services added value, even with advertising. Only 17 percent said they found the services intrusive. Fifty-two percent said they would recommend advertising-financed SMS services to others.
Crucially for companies wanting to advertise their products over SMS, 28 percent of respondents said that the advertising made them interested in the campaign offer, and 18 percent said that since receiving an SMS advert, they had actively searched for more information.
SMS can reach more people than WAP advertising. "WAP was slow to take off, and companies choosing to advertise over mobile phones will naturally turn to the application with the biggest market. This is SMS, and through a personalised approach advertisers can reach their core audience," said Mark Blowers, senior research analyst at industry-watcher, Butler Group.
Simple offerings like SMS will generate most revenue for telecoms operators. The Yankee Group Europe expects wireless data revenues to total £42.3bn in Europe in 2005, 57 percent of it from messaging services. Yankee predicts that over 100 billion SMS messages will be sent in December 2002.
Mat Hanrahan at analyst group, Bloor Research said, "SMS was an unexpected money-spinner for the telecoms carriers. With 3G licences having cost them so much, they will jump at any chance to make revenue from any source, and it looks like this could work."
However, experts added that spamming could threaten the success of SMS, and they said that users must be able to trust their network operators not to misuse personal information.
