Blue light special: Geoworks sends promo messages to receptive wireless audience

Retailers of all kinds of consumer products are finding a whole new advertising outlet in wireless phones. At the same time, wireless service providers are gaining a new outlet for increased revenues without necessarily spending a dime. It's all possible through a service from Geoworks called Discopro.com.

Discopro.com, which refers to discounts and promotions, is an advertiser-sponsored service that sends text messages to wireless phones or pagers. The messages alert recipients to sales or special promotional offers.

Participating advertisers have several options for ensuring responses from customers. Advertisers can embed an 800 number in the message so customers can press a button to immediately connect to a call center, which could send a paper coupon in the mail or relay further instructions. Alternatively, the advertiser could include a special promotional code in the message, which recipients then could reference while making a purchase in a store. The message also could include a Web site address, driving customers to the site to purchase products.

"It's an excellent one-to-one marketing capability," said Rhonda Jobe, vice president of marketing for Geoworks.

The key is that customers sign up for the free service on the Discropro.com Web site and designate the types of promotions they would like to receive. They also define what time of day, which days they would like to receive messages and how many messages they would like to receive.

"It's a customer base that has selected the information they are interested in," Jobe said. Rather than feel spammed by these messages, customers view it more as a service that informs them of special deals that they may be particularly interested in, she said.

Geoworks maintains the customer database and builds relationships with the retailers. Because it uses the short message service (SMS) capability in digital phones, Geoworks doesn't have to negotiate relationships with operators. It sends the messages to end users through the carriers' HTTP gateways - the same way that any user might send a text message to a customer. Geoworks currently can send messages to about 50% of wireless users and expects to increase that coverage to 95% in about a month, Jobe said.

Geoworks also maintains a direct gateway, which would offer a more reliable way to send a large volume of messages to an operator's customers. The company intends to approach operators in the future to possibly install such gateways. First, however, Geoworks will identify operators that have large numbers of customers that subscribe to Discopro.com.

Depending on how operators charge for services such as SMS, they could earn revenue from Discopro.com without investing any capital. In addition to benefiting from each message sent, service providers can earn revenue from calls that customers place to numbers embedded in the messages.

"The whole move behind this is to get more people interested in data," said Jill House, a research analyst for IDC. "From [the operators'] perspective, they're looking for anything that can differentiate them."

In the future, such types of services could allow customers to buy products instantly, if they have payment information stored in the handset.

"E-commerce applications are clearly on the roadmaps for most of these carriers," House said.

Geoworks is targeting Discopro.com at younger generations, advertising the service via banner ads on the Web.

"We first started going after women, but we found that it's about 50/50 male to female so far," Jobe said.