Free business SMS from Salient Mobility gets its legs from ad-insertion

Salient Mobility announced today that it’s SMS serving platform is being offered to enterprise users for free. The new version of the EcoTextSmart service includes the ever-more-popular ad-insertion option, where empty space at the end of the message is filled with an ad. Except in this case, Salient enforces a 35-character empty space so that ads will always be included.

EcoTextSmart provides a pretty wide seletcion of SMS publishing options. It can handle SMS blasts, subscriptions, text-to-action, auto-responses and appointment reminders. Under the new ad-insertion system, all of these services are free to the publishers.

From the release:

“Salient Mobility is one of the first application providers to offer a free full featured SMS text message application with nationwide reach to its users. The intent is to eventually monetize our vast database of SMS publishers through advertising. A big differentiator for us today is our ability to deliver cutting-edge mobile data solutions quickly and efficiently, we deliver relevant and innovative content to consumers through the rich user experience of Business Text Messaging, powered by the EcoTextSmart(TM) Platform,” said Steven Collins, Managing Member Salient Mobility LLC.

What we think?

This is a beautiful example of “press release speak”. This is, in effect, an ad-supported bulk SMS service for publishers. Ah, but everyone calls their service ad-supported, so it’s better to say you’re giving it away for free. That doesn’t change the fact that this isn’t exactly an innovative service. SMS has been getting steadily less and less valuable over the last few years. Also, this system effectively reduces the length of your SMS to 125 characters - further limiting an already pretty limited medium. There are ad-insertion services out there that detect how many characters are left free at the end of an SMS and insert an ad that fits that space - without forcing you to shorten your message length.