ChaCha. Ask Away.

There’s some conflicting data out there about teen receptiveness to mobile advertising. On one hand, we have those who say all teens want to do is talk to each other and that they basically ignore the media, dictating the ways they’ll let the commercial world act toward them. And on the other hand, there is data that shows that half of teens at least say they’d be to some degree interested in receiving mobile ads if they were given some incentive by their carrier.

But we at ChaCha have this theory that teens can be “engaged” with mobile advertising — even without carrier incentives. I think that incentivizing ad viewing is cheating and impure… and (quite honestly) it doesn’t say much about the advertisers if a carrier has to step up and offer incentives just to get a user to look at their ad. Mobile marketing solutions need to be in perfect alignment with the ways youth want to be approached by media, and contain content of the type that acts as its own “incentive.”

Susan Marshall, our VP of Marketing, recently coined the phrase “rich SMS” to describe what ChaCha offers. Now, I’m typically anti-jargon (and I hope someone calls me out on it if I ever use a piece of mobile or marketing jargon without qualifying it), but I’m a fan of “rich SMS” because it’s paradoxical jargon. To be “rich” in mobile content is never to be “SMS.” And to be paradoxical is to juxtapose… to be a re-thinker.

So, yes. We offer rich SMS advertising.

How. Well, it’s complicated. Only not really. Not if you understand ChaCha. Because one uniquely compelling fact about ChaCha is that it’s just as much a business as it is a friend. A smart friend, we like to say.

ChaCha isn’t a Mobile Marketing company — we don’t revolve our business around campaigns, per se. We’re a Mobile Answers company. We revolve our business around providing answers, which is a service of extreme value to our customers. And we build and integrate our clients’ mobile marketing campaigns around and into the answers that [y]our customers need.

So what these people — our users — are doing, essentially, is texting a “commercial friend.”

Is that another paradox?

Imagine really, seriously being friends with a commercial entity. It’s true. We get all kinds of texts from people professing their love to our Guides.

I think what we have on the cusp here is a redefinition of the idea of “advertisement.” Mobile ads — at least not the ones that will be proven effective with the Millennials — may not really seem like “ads” at all.