An eclectic group of “old-timers” from the mobile world got together at the ICA in London last Tuesday to celebrate the 15th anniversary of SMS - the short message service colloquially known, in these parts at least, as txting.

The afternoon was facilitated by Airwide Solutions and while there was a birthday celebration feel to the event, there was also some serious thought in the panel session, chaired by John Delaney (JD) of Ovum, particularly focusing on what the next 15 years might hold.

Kevin Wood, CEO, Airwide said that he felt honoured to have in the room, the first sender and recipient of the first sms message “Merry Christmas” From those humble beginnings no-one could have know the impact it would have. Applications of SMS have exploded and fundamentally changed the way that the world communicates. 15 years seems like a long time - but if you put it in the context of the PC and Internet which had their births in the 1970s, we can see it’s still quite young. It is amazing how quickly this tech has become ingrained in what we do. Messaging volumes break records every day - currently 2 trillion worldwide. Britons send more than 1m per week. So why has it made it so well so quickly and how can we use what we can predict from this to talk about what might come next.

Kevin thinks there are four factors that explain What has been successful and why.

1. Existence of a pervasive standard client.

2. Network interoperability - build confidence

3. Relative measure of utility and ease of use.

4. Affordability or price elasticity - an attraction of SMS is as a cheaper form of communications than talking.

This helps us to look at why MMS for example has not seen the same volumes as SMS. As mobile applications become more sophisticated the predictions of SMS’s demise are often repeated. However, if anything, SMS seems to be getting stronger. What we’re really celebrating here is the genesis of mobile messaging technologies and their evolution.

Here are my light notes from the ensuing panel discussion:

Mike Short, O2 (MS)
Paul Gill, Vodafone UK, (PG)
Jonathan Bass, Incentivated. (JB)

JD: What lessons can we learn?

MS: we need a global context - it’s not just the UK, it’s so pervasive and that brings down the cost per unit and that’s very important, but the important thing is that it’s easy to use on every device and every network. That’s where MMS has fallen down in the past.

JD: What is so attractive as a premium services point of view?

PG: What drove the uptake was the fact that you could quickly get in touch with a customer with content that they had actually asked for. It’s the immediate way you can get news and traffic alerts but as the payload lends itself to a wide range of applications.

JD: Why is it powerful to advertisers?

JB: It’s good for simple and succinct messages - this makes people creative, but it also enables much more personal interactions.

JD: How keen are providers of marketing to get into other richer forms of messaging and what’s holding you back.

JB: Most people want to do something different, but actually then realise that they want to do something simpler.

JD: How much is pricing holding premium services back?

PG: What did negatively impact them was the advent of subscription services and the way that they started out. Confidence returned slowly once we got a handle on it but there is still some resistance among consumers. A lot of consumer education is still needed and we’re not as good as we could have been but we have the controls to police the services, we just need to publicise it more.

JD: how much scope is there for improving sms without compromising the things that made it a success?

MS: britain’s oldest texter, amazed in 2001 that it was someone in their 80s. some linking to internet, ideas for parking, congestion charge etc. at a teachers conference and several have their own messaging services.

The business community are later adopters in terms of enterprise use of SMS and haven’t realised yet the CRM opportunities: “there’s a rat in my cornflakes” or “I need a plumber”.

JD: Is it an advertising nirvana?

JB: Combining wap push and text or improving wap push would be - I want to be able to thread conversations and to be able to see whether somebody’s there. Give me status messages - make it subtly more like IM.

JD: As a mature service, is it flattening out? if so, what can we do to encourage growth?

MS: No. it’s going faster than we expected - there’s more creative marketing, text bundling, bigger bundles, lower average txt price. We’re trying to restore confidence after participation TV scandals and there’s some more work to do but confidence is coming back. To add a global perspective - it’s a global market with enormous growth especially with emerging markets getting inexpensive handsets 350m subscribers in china and growing. In India there are 6m new subscribers per week.

JD: What about sponsored sms? Can it fly or is it intrusive?

JB: You will get a proportion of the customer base who’ll always look for the cheapest deal, however many would pay not to have advertising included. It’s been tried a few times eg 118118. Orange did some research and sponsored txt was in the middle of acceptability. The operators have data on the users and can therefore target consumers very precisely, and analysis needs to be done on what works and what doesn’t.

JD: Impact of IM - do you think it will decrease sms?

JB: No we see evidence that they’re complementary. Compare it with postal services - some are about price, eg freepost and some areabout speed or guaranteed delivery - all the other things are part of the mix, not everyone will want everything. I don’t see any decline in SMS - I’ve been using mobile e-mail from the start but I don’t think about how I’m sending a message now - they’re different things and they have different purposes. And I want something that knows the preference of the recipient.

Q: 95% of all e-mail is spam - 10% of SMS - what do the panel think about the growth of spam SMS?

A: We have to aspire to very high standards and we have good ways of complaining, but one issue is cost, spam e-mail is almost free. it’s easier to guess a mobile number than an e-mail address. and there are ways to filter out spamming, recognising patterns of dodgy behaviour.

Q: The assumption is that text messaging is pervasive - not quite yet, particularly internationally. What can be done.

A: Started out very insular, but the majority of networks really are covered and interoperable - if it is a a problem it’s usually caused by filtering by the receiving network rather than lack of agreement.

Q When can we expect to see more favourable deals for merchants?

A: Revenue shares within the UK is high (some mutters in audience of “doesn’t make it right”) we take a small percentage to cover our delivery costs. 90% of internet businesses don’t have mobile billing because they don’t want to give their money to operators. We must also think of customer demand. We’ve done a lot and there’s more to do and as customer demand increases, probably revenue share will get better. By the way, anyone from the Charity sector - there’s an early day motion by Mark Oaten, to get VAT removed from charitable giving - get your MP to support it.

At which point we retired for cocktails, birthday cake and much more conversation.