Aspen business turns mobile medium into advertising dollars
by Damien Williamson, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
by Damien Williamson, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
Where there’s a medium, there’s advertising, and mobile text messaging is no exception.
According to a 2008 report by the Mobile Marketing Association, there are more than 267 million mobile phone users in the United States, with more than 160 million of those consumers using text messaging, or short message service (SMS), in the third quarter of 2008. Worldwide, the numbers of mobile phone subscribers is estimated at nearly 3 billion.
And a new Aspen company, Qittle SMS Message Solutions, was recently founded by valley resident Casey McConnell to tap into that growing demographic. While Qittle is far from the first business to see potential in the text messaging market – SMS advertisements have been booming in Europe for years and increasingly so in the U.S. – it is the first Roaring Fork Valley-based business to do so.
“I’ve always been a big advocate of e-mail marketing; I think it’s pretty powerful stuff,” says McConnell, who previously served as the Aspen Club and Spa’s marketing manager until September 2008. “And I saw a clear link between text marketing and e-mail marketing.”
The company, headquartered inside the Aspen Club, launched this fall as a way to both track the effectiveness of other forms of advertising like newspapers and magazines, and as a new method of contacting interested consumers.
“Companies always want to know how effective their advertisements are in newspapers, magazines and other media,” McConnell says. “With mobile marketing, businesses can have a call to action that’s coded into those ads that have consumers text a certain code to get a deal, and then you can get a much better idea of an ad’s effectiveness.”
In that way, McConnell says direct SMS marketing works in tandem with more traditional forms of media as opposed to being a high-tech replacement. And with shows like “American Idol” using text messages to let fans vote – and even Aspen’s own 2008 Winter X Games 12 allowing viewers to vote for their favorite Big Air competition riders – mobile text communication has the potential to be big business.
“The whole premise is that a company creates some incentive to opt in, like Garnish Café offering 50 percent off your first meal if you text ‘Aspen2′ to 32075,” McConnell says. “After that, Chef Clark has your information and can reach out to you when he has other specials.”
And larger organizations that have joined Qittle, like the town of Snowmass Village, see even wider applications of the interface platform on Qittle.com.
“It’s a great opportunity for Snowmass to collect a lot of data from visitors,” McConnell says. “Summer is a lot slower than winter, so the idea is to build up that database in the winter so they can really put out the word for events like Chili Pepper and Brew Fest and the free concert series in the summer. And they’re even doing a text for ski reports where you text in ‘Snowmass’ to 32075 and you’ll be notified whenever there is more than six inches of snow.”
Qittle has already signed about 15 valley businesses – from small Carbondale car shops to whole towns – in the 90 days it’s been operational. And, McConnell says, they’ve even been courting larger national companies. Since overhead costs consist mostly of office space and computers, and customers, for the most part, manage their own accounts on Qittle.com, the three-person staff focuses mainly on marketing the business.
And that low overhead ultimately benefits Qittle’s customers, something that strikes a chord with managers of marketing budgets.
“People haven’t stopped marketing,” McConnell says, “they’re just being smarter with where they put there money. And text message marketing helps them to do that.”
But while McConnell admits that it is difficult to track exactly how many consumers respond to text message calls to action in advertisements, he likens the trend to that of businesses acquiring e-mail accounts in the late ’90s.
“Starting around ’98/’99, it started becoming impossible to run a business without an e-mail account. And text messaging is the new trend. It’s the quickest way to get anyone data, and often the only way with the disappearance of home phones, particularly among younger demographics.”
But with the increased proliferation of text message marketing comes an increase in something far more sinister: spam. Large corporations like Wal-mart and Home Depot are already jumping on the bandwagon, meaning the next new trend might just be text message spam filtering.
“Consumers need to know two things,” McConnell says. “First, the businesses pay for the text message charges, especially since most people have unlimited text plans, and to remove yourself from a list, all you have to do is reply with the word ‘stop.’”
damien@aspendailynews.com
