ASPCA,The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,has been successful at converting standard-alert subscribers to donors using SMS.

By sending a text message with keywords CAT or DOG to short code 27722,mobil users can get free cat and dog tips offered by ASPCA.

It asks subscribers to reply with the keyword GIVE to make a $5 donation,at the bottom of the ASPCA’s SMS alerts.

Tony Aiello, cofounder and senior vice president of mGive, Denver, CO.said,”The ASPCA is widely recognized as a forward-thinking nonprofit, in that they’ve embraced technology faster than many in the space with their online strategies, building email lists and they have donor management databases in place.”

He further said,”The next big wave from a direct marketing perspective will come from the mobile space, as it’s the most effective way to manage donor and constituent contacts, so it was fairly logical for the ASPCA to develop another permission-based channel to communicate with their supporters.”

Donors of ASPCA are organized in silos, one for dog fanatics and another for cat fanatics.

Mr. Aiello said,”SMS helps nonprofits engage with people in the mobile channel.”

“They can sign up at live events or via our Web site to receive the mobile alerts that include tips from the organization, which can start building its mobile list and start reaching out to potential donors.”he added.

Text messages of ASPCA read as follows:

“Examine Fido’s ears weekly. Tell a vet if there is redness/inflammation/waxy buildup or unusual smell. Reply GIVE to donate $5 to animals in need! Text DOG to 27722″

“Keep cats away from liquid potpourri. If ingested, it can cause drooling/vomiting/difficult breathing. Reply GIVE to donate $5 to animals in need! Text CAT to 27722. Text GIVE to 27722″

“Thanks for your donation to ASPCA. $5 will be deducted from your phone bill. Text GIVE and give up to 5 times.”

Mr. Aiello claims,On average, 5 percent of ASPCA’s subscribers respond per call-to-action, with 86 percent completing the donation,resulting in thousands of dollars in donations for the organization.

He said,”The ASPCA had the luxury of building a list before the giving part, but you can also do that simultaneously by sending them a WAP link to get more data from them.”

To do more with their marketing and spend less in today’s recessionary marketplace,Ogilvy North America is helping clients.

To provide suggestions to its clients regarding the challenges that most companies are facing in this recession,this new offering brings together Ogilvy’s marketing strategy,analytics,measurement,email,technology and media services.

“21 Ogilvy Solutions” has been designed by Ogilvy to give strategies and methods to its clients for maximizing the value and performance of their marketing budgets.

Marc Fleishhacker, managing director for Ogilvy,New York said,”Last autumn,we actually developed this based upon feedback we got starting in the midst of the economic explosion,volcano,or downturn,and we started monitoring the most pressing questions our customers were asking.”

In the autumn of 2008,the demand for the practice surfaced as Ogilvy’s leadership began meeting with clients who were anxiously looking for smart, measurable and cost effective marketing mediums that would support their businesses and brands in this difficult economy.

Mr. Fleishhacker remarked,”Clients were asking how to redefine their marketing budget, which is the Holy Grail of marketing questions.”

“The key driver of all the questions clients were asking with increasing urgency was really all about speed and how to cut their budget intelligently.”he added.

He further said,”We came up with 21 solutions, many of which include what I will call a channel-agnostic approach, and mobile is big a part of it.”

In the words of Mr. Fleishhacker,”Brands should ask themselves ‘Am I sufficiently leveraging mobile?’ and ‘How do I get more value out of SMS programming?”

“Brands should ask themselves ‘Am I sufficiently leveraging mobile?’ and ‘How do I get more value out of SMS programming?”

Ogilvy North America is the largest unit of the Ogilvy Group agency network, a subsidiary of WPP Group plc.

It has offices in different places like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Durham, Minneapolis, Denver and throughout Canada.

The strategies are all focused on rapid assessment and quick delivery of services meant to ameliorate the impact of the current economic crisis.

Mr. Fleishhacker said,”"Brands want to know ‘How do we increase customer engagement with our SMS programs?”

“Our email and mobile optimization solution is specific to mobile channel,”he added.

Mr. Fleishhacker further said,”Most of our U.S. customers are anywhere from children to adolescents when it comes to mobile.”

“Clients are finally seeing the huge opportunities that mobile can bring them, with 57 percent of the U.S. population using text messaging on a regular basis and 100 to 110 year on year growth in the SMS channel,”he said.

To promote the newest medical insurance plans to small businesses and professionals,mobile technology was used by United Healthcare.

The click-to-call campaign saw a 0.6 percent click-through rate.The insurance company tapped MoVoxx to create the campaign.

Alec S. Andronikov, chief mobilizer and CEO of MoVoxx, Santa Monica, CA said,”The strategy behind the campaign was to help United Healthcare
reach out to small businesses and professionals and get them to call and speak to a call center representative.”

MoVoxx provides marketers with mobile audience reach by partnering with SMS content publishers who deliver real-time messages to millions of consumers
on a daily basis.

MoVoxx partnered with Reuters For this particular campaign.

The advertisement was recieved by the Consumers who were signed up for business news alerts,below the message that they were opted-in for.

“Small business health plans lower costs.Design yours today with United Healthcare 877-272-7622,” said the text ad.

To be connected to a call center,Consumers could then click on the telephone number,where a representative would give them more information.

Because of this campaign United Healthcare reached a highly-targeted and very niche audience on a mobile medium
with the help of MoVoxx’s audience segmentation capabilities.

According to Mr. Andronikov,the 0.6 percent click — through is a very high response rate within the industry given the nature of the offer
- insurance – and difficulty of reach within the target market.

Studies show that 95 percent of mobile phones are SMS-enabled and 40 percent have unlimited SMS.

The most populer brand coca-cola and Church’s Chicken have launched interactive promotional initiatives that target mature,multicultural,urban young-adults with food,video games and mobile technology.

To engage and interact with a younger segment of the brands’ target audience,the fast-food brand is in collaboration with Coca-Cola on a promotion called “Be Heard” that uses mobile technology.

Farnaz Wallace, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Church’s Chicken, Atlanta said,”Texting is an important and popular means of communication for our customers,especially among our younger audience.”

She further said,”Therefore,we wanted to leverage the urban youth’s passion points cost-effectively and with marketing precision.”

According to her,”By doing this, we hope to make our brand a more relevant part of their fast-paced daily lives and excite them about our promotions and value-driven messaging.”

The Be Heard promotion,slated for implementation early this year,lets customers text in a keyword to a short code after answering four questions about their recent Church’s in-store visit.

As in order to enter the sweepstakes, Customers can to text keyword “Good” to short code 30123.

After the submission of text message, customers instantly receive a bounce-back coupon with various offers, including $1 off any value combo meal and a free order of Bombers with any value combo purchase at regular menu price.

Customers gets a chance to win $1,000 in cash to be awarded on a weekly basis for the nine-week promotion.
And a Be Heard poster featuring artwork by Kadir Nelson and an inspirational poem by R&B artist Musiq Soulchild.

The urban youth market is the second largest and fastest growing segment nationwide and one of Church’s core customers.

Ms. Wallace said,”Since Church’s has limited broadcast media dollars in certain markets, one of our biggest challenges is that the only way many customers find out about a promotion is when they get to a store.”

“To overcome this challenge, we are hoping to bring awareness to our promotions through other means such as mobile marketing,”she said.

She further said,”Our goal is to find a place ahead of the curve by exploring newer means of communications to target the young, multicultural segment.”
“We may find that it includes Twitter or some social media channel,”she added.

Giant of Department store,Bloomingdale’s is using mobile for its fall fashion campaign – Lights, Camera, Fashion.To engage with customers in a new way,they have added an element of interactivity.

A three to five minute film that was shot and produced entirely in New York, will be shown in all Bloomingdale’s stores over the course of 15 days.
And then Shoppers will have a chance to vote for their favorite BFlix film via SMS or Bloomingdales.com.on the Bloomingdales.com Web site.

Anne Bridges,senior vice president for Bloomingdale’s,Cincinnat said,”We chose SMS voting for the customers who would see the films in the stores.”

“We needed to be able to accommodate the various ways in which customers would see the films to make voting convenient in all cases,”he said.

KaOoga Mobile powers the mobile component for Bloomingdale’s, the upscale department store chain that is part of Macy’s Inc.

Bloomingdale’s can use the list for future marketing if Consumers who vote are actually added to an opt-in database of names.

Once the votes are tallied,the winning director will get a trip to Film Independent’s nationally televised Spirit Awards which is said to be the indie film industry’s biggest night of the year,in Los Angeles.

While Bloomingdale’s made itself available to aid in the production of the shorts, the films are not about shopping or about the retailer, though subtle nods to the store appear in each.

Having the mobile text-to-vote option added to the short trailers in the viewing lounge at Bloomingdale’s locations allows customers to instantly interact with the video monitors.

customers are helping send a director to the awards show By voting for best video.

In the same way, Bloomingdale’s launched Facebook and Twitter pages for engaging its customers in an interactive way.

According to a panel at the CTIA Wireless 2009: Mobile Life conference, the per-message fees that carriers charge mobile marketers are killing the business model for SMS and MMS-based marketing.

In the United States,every day more than 2.6 billion text messages are sent,giving it the largest reach of any mobile channel and making it a powerful enabler to brand recognition and development,
with some of the biggest brands in the world having embraced texting as a significant consumer touch point.

According to the panel,However, the messaging business model needs serious retooling to make it viable for advertisers and aggregators.

Panel moderator and president of Moblico LLC,John Styers said,”Messaging is the most ubiquitous form of mobile communication, and there are great new opportunities in the long tail, but the per-message fee obliterates the business model, because that leads to unbounded liability.”

He further said,”A new model is required for the industry to take the next step to the new frontier of messaging,and that model cannot include a per-message fee.”

Accrding to him, all organizations have to work on flat fees, and the original models were only meant to support the ecosystem for 6 or 9 months.

“The carriers have done little to speed the robust development of the messaging ecosystem in the U.S., and it needs support from the back end,”he said.

Different types of Messaging include SMS, XHTML, optimized XHTML, iPhone-specific messaging and XMPP. Eric Collins, vice president of Nuance, discussed his company’s voice-to-text and text-to-voice offerings.

For every type of messaging,companies have struggled to establish a stable business to take advantage of the inventory within the different types of messaging.

David Oberholzer, vice president of Limbo,”For advertising-supported SMS, the net revenue per message is $0.004, and the carriers dispute this, but that’s the reality of the business.”

“The model isn’t completely solid, and it’s unrealistic to think the CPMs we’ll be able to charge will go up dramatically, so it’s unrealistic for carriers trying to impose these types of per-message fees.”he said.

“Even relatively small carrier fees will drive out innovation to other platforms, and that’s already happening — look at all the advertising in iPhone apps,” he said.”If carriers raise costs, then that will be exacerbated.”

Panelists seemed curious to reach out to carriers and discuss alternatives to the per-message-fee model.

Mr. Oberholzer said. “We’re looking for a way to grow the pot, such as including demographic and location information so we can charge higher rates and everyone can make more money.”

“To grow the platform, everyone involved in the ecosystem has to engage in open dialogue,” he said.

NBC who had success building SMS into other campaigns, often encouraging TV viewers to engage with their favorite shows via SMS.

Mr.canter said,”There are lots of opportunities in messaging, but we’re struggling to find the multimillion dollar way to make messaging in and of itself a business.”

Many Other panelists agreed that when integrated with other media,messaging works wonder.

Eric Harber, president/COO of HipCricket,”SMS is great when you weave it in as part of your overall mix, but it’s not incredibly exciting as a stand-alone.”

VeriSign announced a record-breaking quarter for mobile messaging based on its index of statistics.

VeriSign, a mobile aggregator and provider of Internet infrastructure services, delivered a total of 94.8 billion application-to-person and person-to-person messages across its mobile messaging platforms, during the second quarter of this year. This new statistic is an 82 percent growth from last year.

According to Charles Landry, vice president and general manager of products and innovation at VeriSign, Mountain View, CA, With mobile messaging, marketers can engage customers in ways they never have before. The mobile phone has become the most pervasive, personal communications tool available.

“We hardly ever leave home without it,” he said. “SMS is a lowest common denominator technology that is easy to use, appeals to all consumer demographics, and access to it is now 100 percent available on mobile devices in the U.S.”

VeriSign helps companies and consumers worldwide engage in communications and commerce. Their messaging and mobile media division delivers messages for carriers and content providers worldwide. The combined networks connect more than 700 carriers in more than 200 countries and reaches 3 billion wireless subscribers.

The new messaging stat comes with $3.3 billion in revenue generated for VeriSign’s service provider clients, double the revenue from last year.In the first half of this year, VeriSign delivered a total of 178.8 billion messages worldwide, translating to 26 messages for every person in the world.The network also set a signle-day record on June 25 by enabling 1.2 billion messages over a 24-hour period.

A one-hour record was set between 3 and 4 p.m. PDT with 102 million messages being sent. This record coincides with the death announcements of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.

The records set in the second quarter demonstrate the growing presence of mobile messaging in our culture, according to VeriSign. People are continuing to use the power of text messaging to communicate with friends and stay connected about significant events.

According to Harte-Hanks’ Aberdeen Group, Coca-Cola’s mobile program, My Coke Rewards, has emerged as one of the most popular consumer packaged goods sites in mobile marketing since its launch 3 years ago.

Its quiet easy to participate in the program. One has to enter unique codes under the caps of specially marked Coke products online or by texting in the keyword to a short code. When they have accumulated enough points to redeem a reward from one or more of the program’s participating partners, they make their selection and the points are deducted from their account.

According to Jeff Zabin, Chicago-based vice president and research fellow at the Aberdeen Group, Best-in-class companies such as Coca-Cola are increasing their focus on mobile marketing as a percentage of their overall marketing mix, with 71 percent indicating that their mobile marketing activities are integrated with their other marketing tactics and media buys either somewhat or extensively. One-quarter of best-in-class companies indicate that mobile marketing now accounts for more than 10 percent of their overall marketing budget. For 18 percent of best-in-class companies, mobile marketing now accounts for more than 15 percent of their overall budget.

Mobile marketing is winning a greater share of marketing budgets, given the business benefits including improved brand image, increased market research capabilities and better response-tracking.

Mobile devices have now become a major focal point for growing the My Coke Rewards program.

The mobile site for Coke’s customer relationship management initiative is http://wap.mycokerewards.com.

The main priority for the beverage giant is to reach on-the-go consumers via their handsets. The campaign encouraged mobile phone users, regardless of their handset type, to join the My Coke Rewards program and sample Coke Zero.

Coke achieved a 5.2 percent click-through rate with the mobile ad campaign.

Instead of pushing messages out to consumers, Coke’s marketing strategy is focused on encouraging consumers to pull content from its various platforms, including mobile.

The company is primarily focused on acquisition growth rate, which is currently tracking at 5 percent to 10 percent per month for consumers who have completed the two-step process of linking their phones and then opting in to Coke’s SMS database.Coke sends out text messages to that database regularly, which reinforces consumers’ brand loyalty.

On average, the My Coke Rewards mobile program has a 9 percent participation rate.

FreeRxReminder.com is offering prescription medication reminders via SMS.

Aaccording to a report from the Center for Disease Control, FreeRxReminder.com is trying to ensure the timely and safe consumption of medication for the 47 percent of Americans using at least one prescription drug. The service from FreeRxReminder.com lets patients keep closer track of their prescription medications and dosage times.

For this purpose they are currently using carriers that support email alerts that get sent via SMS.

According to Rex Bowden Jr., president of Group Net, Baton Rouge, LA, the strategy is to help those who have to take medication on a daily basis. They can get easy reminders via mobile and email. It is an easy way to help those that may forget. She said that” Just about everyone now carries at the very least a phone on them so we figured this would be the perfect place to reach them.”

According to a report from the Center for Disease Control, it was found that prescription drug consumption among the senior population spikes up to 66 percent in the 45-65 age range. Eighty-seven percent of the 65-plus age group are also consuming prescription drugs.

Another concern of FreeRxReminder.com is risk of forgetting having already taken medication that this age group faces. FreeRxReminder.com is addressing these challenges head-on by providing a free reminder service for anyone who feels it could assist in daily life or prevent a tragic mistake. They claim that written medication schedules and pill cases can only help people remember to take their pills to a certain extent. Some people who live by the out of sight, out of mind doctrine may need more.

This service lets users choose the method by which they would like to receive their medication reminders: phone or email.

Mr. Bowden thinks that this is a great platform because 90 percent of the population in the U.S. has a mobile device. It’s hard to find someone not carrying a mobile device at any time.

The Governors Highway Safety Association,a leading road safety group,has announced its support for state laws banning drivers from sending and receiving text messages.

The move is a welcome response to growing evidence that texting while driving creates a greater risk of crashing than even drunken driving.

According to various studies, drivers who send or receive a text message tend to take their eyes off the road for about five seconds,
It is enough time for a vehicle going at highway speed to travel more than 100 yards.

In the words of The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute,truckers who send messages while driving are 23 times more likely to cause a crash or near-crash than a nontexting trucker.

But texting while driving is prohibited hardly in 20 states.And some of those,like New York’s new law,impose minor fines and a negligible enforcement scheme that allows police officers to penalize a driver for the offense only if stopped for another infraction, such as a broken taillight or speeding.

The Alert Drivers Act of 2009,a promising Senate bill,would do exactly that.For drivers who do texting while driving, states should adopt federally set minimum penalties or forfeit 25 percent of highway financing.

States would have two years to comply and could recover lost funds once they passed acceptable laws.
A companion bill has been introduced in the House.