When is the message “What are you doing?” not nosy parental intrusion? When it’s asked via a text message. This weekend, that message, texted by my husband to our son, got the response “Watching the Bears”. A phone call at the same time would likely have gone unanswered.
Parents are finding that often the best way (or only way) to share a long-distance moment with their teen children is to text them. That is even more true when the person you are trying to reach is watching television.
Steve Smith’s recent MediaPost — “SMS + TV = Teachable Moment” — comments specifically on how text messaging is extending media reach by fostering “parallel texting”, and shares his experience sharing a ‘Mad Men’ episode with his daughter, via text.
“…the marriage of TV with SMS is more profound than any one of us would have guessed just a few years ago. Text exchanges form the connective tissue between remote locations during a shared media experience. I know that some cable TV networks have already tried to leverage this phenomenon by creating mobile chat rooms around a TV show. My guess is that like all things mobile, the most important activity is really going on one-to-one.”
Smith predicts that the mobile phone will provide more of a “second screen” role than the PC ever will. For advertisers, this means that a campaign can really boost its response if a TV ad is coupled with an SMS short code. Smith cited a recent study by Mobile Common in which a Shedd Aquarium TV ad with an SMS call-to-action generated 325% more contest entries than any other call-to-action.
I predict that ad extension via SMS will continue to grow, as these results are replicated by other advertisers.
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