For some time I have believed that the universal availability of unified shortcodes, which enable people to text, call, video call or MMS using just one 5 digit number, would be an important stage in the growth of mobile marketing.
Therefore I was pleased to read that O2, the last remaining network to enable these services, is due to make the functionality available sometime in April 2008. Advertisers and media owners will now be able to offer their consumers just one number to interact with them, irrelevant of how that consumer wishes to communicate. This will hopefully be another reason for the Direct Response agencies and other areas of the advertising industry to adopt mobile marketing as a key channel. Now all the networks need to do is bring the prices down and make unified shortcodes comercially viable to the masses. Jeremy