In an unusual deal, the Motley Fool personal finance site on Thursday agreed to sponsor Yahoo!Inc.’s
short messaging service (SMS) alerts in the United
Kingdom and Ireland.
The agreement is one of the first struck that brings advertising support to
a major content site’s SMS messages. SMS are the limited-length messages
that can be delivered to cellular phones, and which have a much greater
reach than WAP content.
The Motley Fool will be the exclusive sponsor of a daily share price alert,
distributed to the 200,000 users that request to receive the service from
yahoo.co.uk. The SMS messages will carry the tag line: “by www.fool.co.uk.”
The campaign begins on July 31 and will run for two months as part of an
integrated package, which includes banners, e-mail, and section sponsorship.
Media buying firm i-level handled the deal.
“There is a lot of hype around WAP advertising, whereas SMS offers a genuine
broad band reach mobile solution right now,” said Faith Carthy, group head
at i-level.