Advertising using short message services (SMS) is exploding in Europe and Asia, and successful campaigns have been used to market everything from movies to McDonalds. Avesair Inc. is a North Carolina-based provider of mobile marketing technology and service solutions. Avesair, which was founded in October, 2000, recently announced it has delivered more than 50 million paid wireless ads (SMS) using its Avesair Mobile Marketing Network. The company had response rates up to 5 percent, which is roughly 10 times higher than traditional online ad campaigns.

Avesair has provided advertisers such as Mercedes and Volvo with the technology, as well as target its solutions towards mobile carriers, publishers, advertisers, and media companies. AT&T Wireless, Nokia, MSN, 12snap, Enpocket, SignalSoft, and Boston.com are among their diverse clientele.

The key to Avesair's ongoing success is that it is not in the business of selling simple SMS campaigns that basically spam millions of users. Avesair provides its Mobile Marketing Suite to create complex, interactive marketing technologies that use SMS and numerous other technologies -- mobile, authoring, Web, database -- to enable then kinds of campaigns that companies hope end-users will actually want to participate in.

The company uses SMS and WAP to ultimately deliver the ads, but behind that and conjunction with that are push-related technologies like WML, HDML, HTML, WXML, and pull related technologies like SMS text with dialogs, MMS, HTML email, and WAP alerts.

Sean Harrison, executive vice president of business development at Avesair, explained how the company creates complex interactive campaign tools using what are generically referred to as decision trees. Decision trees are essentially based on a root question with numerous choices presented to the recipient as potential answers. Each answer has more choices, depending on the requisite complexity and goal of the campaign. Participants may or may not win a prize in some contest, or may simply be thanked for participating, or may be re-directed with embedded links to points on a Web site. The possibilities are really endless, as are the number of branches on the tree - at least mathematically.

The point of these architectures, however, is to create a captivating SMS marketing tool that exposes the user to as much information about the product/service as possible, or as desired by the customer.

In the areas of packaged goods and integrated media campaigns, one way that Avesair is using its technology is by what are called "integrated SMS short codes." These codes, which are designed to be located on products or in various aspect of media campaigns designed to sell them (like TV commercials or billboards) create an "opt-in" environment that the user clearly has to initiate and can in no way be considered spam. The user sees a code like "007up" or some such thing and enters it into his/her phone as an SMS message and sends it. In this manner the dialogue or resulting link to more information is set in motion, all initially by a simple SMS message.

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