Props to reporter Diane Bartz for this story! Nothing like a Senate subcommittee to stir the pot and place the U.S. Carriers on notice ;-). I am not well versed on how these sub-committee processes work so I won’t comment on that angle.

However…..On the Carrier side of the business, perhaps these price increases are being used to ‘influence’ subscribers to sign up for a recurring messaging bundling where revenue recognition is greatly enhanced?? Are these higher prices designed to ‘milk’ the increase in SMS traffic all of the Carriers have experienced year over year??

While text messaging functionality may be ubiquitous on today’s U.S. installed handset base, not everyone is using SMS nor is every wireless sub signed up to a text messaging plan. Mmetrics/comScore peg the number of active (sends at least 1 message per month) at around the 50% mark.. other analyst firms come in around that figure as well. Yes, frequency of use does differ across demographic profiles e.g. Gen Y are heavy text users -72% text at least monthly according to Forrester Research. PLEASE ALSO KEEP IN MIND that the overwhelming majority of the text messages being sent are Peer-to-Peer (P2P) versus Application-to-Peer (A2P) aka Mobile Marketing programs.

Regarding a messaging plan - I have seen where Jupiter Research estimates that 2/3 of all wireless subscribers belong to some sort of text messaging plan. (I’d like to confirm with each U.S. Carrier what they actually see)

With the FCC hovering in the background, the U.S. Carriers are certainly doing their best to police their own off-deck mobile marketing/commerce programs as all of the major Carriers now utilize third party program audit firms. And while the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) continues to try and establish a set of cross-Carrier industry standards via their Consumer Best Practices guidelines, the major U.S. Carriers still have not adopted the guidelines as their de jure “LAWS’ as each major Carrier has issued addendum’s to the MMA’s guidelines. These addendums are essentially enforced by the audit firms each Carrier has contracted with.

As I’ve blogged about before, this is part of the reason why Mobile Marketing - at least from a program execution standpoint - is confusing and at times exasperating. Ensuring your mobile marketing program is compliant with the MMA guidelines, plus say 4-5 subtly different sets of Carrier rules is taxing on human (QA, account managers, engineers, etc.) and technical resources - especially when the individual Carriers make sudden, unexpected changes to their policies (as they have been known to do).

Quick note on the audit firms: program auditing is a niche industry that has recently grown to prominence within the U.S. Carrier-Aggregator-Marketer ecosystem. It is NOT a perfected science yet, as the audit teams have the tough task of educating their employees on the current set of “rules”, keeping up with ever-changing executions of 3rd-party programs and maintaining a fair and balanced interpretation of the many “grey” areas found within the many sets of policy guidelines we as an industry strive to adhere to.

First off, did you notice the iPhone icons on the sample image??! A closer look reveals that nearly all of them are exact copies. Engadget has blown the image up so you can see the Chinese characters.

Placing cloning discussions aside for the moment, try to imagine a world where large numbers of teenagers are carrying mobile phones equipped with projectors. The vision of influential teens displaying an MMS, mobile internet page, video clip or unique application on their school locker with a major brand located somewhere for an audience to see is intriguing. The “I want that too” viral quotient could be off the charts and the idea of a moving billboard becomes a reality. Viral video and social networking also would get a big boost.

(NOTE: If you think mobile advertising reporting is tough now, tracking impressions in this sort of scenario would be an extremely difficult to say the least.)

This concept along with my previous post on leveraging mobile SD cards for marketing purposes are just two examples of how fast mobile technology is evolving and thus creating new marketing opportunities via the handset. Granted we are still trying to figure out SMS and banner ads, but the future looks promising!

That’s a lot of phones with removable memory slots! Of course the real trick will be educating consumers on actually purchasing these cards and using them, but that’s up to smart merchandisers and to some extent companies like SanDisk to figure that out. I can’t imagine the Carriers are thrilled with the concept of pre-loaded memory cards as it potentially cuts them out of application download revenue share and data usage fees, but nevertheless the concept has potential to spur consumers to utilize their handsets for more than just phone calls.

There have been companies (SEE ROK Media) that have loaded content onto mobile memory cards in the past, but the uptake to my knowledge has been negligible in a retail scenario. A good sign that this concept might work is that the practice of “sideloading” content, especially music, has had very good traction - especially outside of the States. Consumers, primarily youth, have discovered the cost savings associated with downloading and sharing music while bypassing their Carrier’s networks.

Marketers, especially those targeting Generation Y consumers, might start experimenting with mixing mobile content such as music or games with utility applications (e.g. the Kellogg’s Exercise reminder) that showcase the brand being promoted. Rest assured that their will be unique advertising opportunities within the memory card as the developers have significant control over the card’s actions.

Media companies dabbling in Mobile today may view mobile storage cards as yet another distribution outlet for their video content. I can certainly envision NBC packaging a special “OFFICE” SD Card filled with short snippits of the show’s best bits.

Interesting, but certainly not a shocking prediction given the rapid adoption of smartphones here in the U.S. and the increase in promotions from the Carriers for low-cost, flat rate data plans. However, there are a couple of things to consider when thinking about whether or not Mobile Email will be a next BIG thing that marketers will need to pay close attention to with regards to optimizing the consumer experience on a handset.

First of all, email users will need a data plan of some sort and Nielsen Mobile recently pegged the percentage of consumers with an unlimited data plan at 14%. The research firm also stated that 95 million (37%) subscribers paid for mobile internet access either as part of a subscription or transactionally and that 40 million subs were active users of mobile internet (used at least once in a given month).

There is an important distinction to make within the aforementioned numbers in that they don’t represent (at least I don’t think they do) those consumers accessing email via emails readers from say Good or Blackberry versus their mobile browser. It’s safe to assume that most corporate users are accessing email via a reader versus a browser, but as MMetrics noted, the smartphone penetration rate is close to 7% within the U.S.- This number isn’t exactly huge, but there is data that supports that these users are heavy users of email via their devices.

From an overall addressable market, MMetrics stated that 13.1% of wireless subscribers had used email on their phone during a specific time period and Nielsen Mobile stated that eMail was the second most visited category (on the mobile web) after Portals. Again, were not talking huge numbers, but significant enough to warrant a closer look at the consumer experience.- (NOTE: as of May 2008 Yahoo! had 14 million unique visitors to their mobile mail page according to Nielsen.)

I did some quick testing of some HTML emails via my Yahoo! email account on Nokia’s S60 browser, Palm’s TREO 750W browser and an Openwave browser via Verizon’s popular LG VX8300 handset. On each browser HTML gets stripped out and the rendering is not easy on the eyes to say the least. I even tried GMAIL on the Treo browser and some of the hyperlinks within an HTML newsletter were rendered inactive. On the reader side, trying to read HTML emails via a Blackberry reader or Palm reader produced equally frustrating results.

From a marketer’s perspective if you are targeting an on-the-go business crowd or a demographic that utilizes smartphones, it may not be enough to assume that handset OEMs, browser developers, internet email providers and email reader vendors will utilize tools and transcoding tricks to properly render your campaign emails properly. Your message may be lost and deleted before the consumer ever has the chance to re-read your email on their PC.

That said, there are some companies such as Pivotal Veracity that offer to optimize your emails for the various device types and email readers. (This company has some interesting comparison shots of how html emails render across a handful of different devices including Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile.)

Quick Anecdote: when attending industry events such as CTIA or MMA or presenting to advertising agencies it is always fun to watch a decent number of users fumble around on their smartphones when you ask them to participate in a demo via SMS. They have gotten so used to sending short emails back and forth between other smartphone-toting colleagues that TXTING is now an afterthought.