Rogers to boost SMS office staff as carrier scrambles to meet demand

Rogers Wireless Inc. says it will bolster its back-end office staff to deal with mounting demand for short messaging service (SMS)-based marketing campaigns. As the number of SMS users increases by nearly 25% each quarter, Rogers VP John Boynton told a recent conference on mobile marketing that the company is struggling to keep potential customers on top of growth in the industry, and to meet demand for co-branded campaigns between the carrier and other companies. At the Mobile Marketing Boot Camp in Toronto last month, Boynton told an audience of mainly interactive marketing boutiques that SMS messaging is rapidly becoming a key ingredient in advertising campaigns across a spectrum of goods and services. To those not already on the bandwagon, he said: "From the guy who sees this every day, it's already here and you're missing it." The company has already participated in some high-profile campaigns such as with Canadian Idol and Staples, but Rogers has stood alone for its aggressive pursuit of co-branding campaigns. One of the best known is a deal between it and TSN to sponsor the specialty TV channel's Friday night CFL broadcasts. Sources say privately that the company is the only one of the four major cellcos in competition with the half dozen or so third-party content aggregators that also create and implement campaigns. Free incoming messages for the user, Boynton said, have proven a key differentiator for the company in attracting users and partners. It's the co-branding campaigns that Boynton said require the most work, and thus the company's intention to add to its five full-time staff already working full-time on SMS messaging. "It's slightly more labour-intensive to do far more innovative, complex campaigns. It doesn't take a lot of resources to hand out a short code. It's really the stuff where people want to mesh their brand with ours and link marketing strategies tactically," he told Report on Wireless. The company is still fine-tuning its co-branding strategy, rehearsing such considerations as their frequency. But Boynton said it's likely Rogers will participate in at least one program a month, with a major campaign every quarter. For example, the company will probably re-enact its SMS messaging championship this year - this time with other partners - and some kind of Christmas campaign. He notes that campaigns can be created in as little as two weeks, but that Rogers is still testing the marketplace to find a saturation point. But, he said, where Rogers doesn't currently have the resources to work with every company that wants to launch an interactive SMS campaign, the company is working closely with the handful of aggregators that have established relationships with all four carriers: MyThum, Impact Mobile, M-Qube and others. Though the competitive environment has only been seriously in place for the last year and a half - since about the time of the introduction of coordinated shortcodes (RoW, March 31/03) - those aggregators have already proven valuable in working with marketing agencies and companies that want to jump into the fray. "If I can draw a parallel, the same thing happened in the Internet industry," Boynton said. "All these guys have ideas and small apps and content, and they wanted to deal directly with the Internet service providers. It's really an issue of bandwidth. How can you possibly deal with every guy who has every possible kind of content around the world? The only way to efficiently deal with it is to deal with aggregators." Boynton said there is room for more aggregators in the Canadian marketplace, though those companies will have to establish strong relationships with both the carriers and marketing agencies to provide a valuable service.

Rogers to boost SMS office staff as carrier scrambles to meet demand

News | September 9, 2003

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