A new service has been introduced by Vertis Marketing Technology, which allows readers or viewers to request information to be emailed to them by sending a text message. The first magazine to use the product is Marketing Direct (a UK title published by Haymarket). Although there could be benefits to the readers, we suspect that the fact that this gives publishers an opportunity to build a txt AND email database is probably the main attraction, especially as readers are encouraged to request articles to be send to friends’ and colleagues’ email accounts. Once the addresses are acquired, however, persuading these people to opt-in to receive marketing messages will be a huge challenge.
