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VeriSign predicts messaging surge on Valentine's Day, throughout '09

With 2008 now over, VeriSign expects the messaging surge to continue, as it projects more than 320 billion messages to be carried on its network by the end of the year.

The company also expects its record of 1.1 billion messages delivered in a single day -- set on Christmas Day 2008 -- to be easily surpassed on Feb. 14, Valentine's Day, when it expects 1.2 billion SMS messages to be delivered through VeriSign's networks. Based on historical data, this projection factors in an expected 25 percent increase through VeriSign's networks on key holidays where texting plays a large role.

"A lot of the Valentine's Day messages will be person-to-person, but we do see some early adopters in the marketing advertising space taking advantage of the volume growth of SMS and MMS," said Charles Landry, Sacramento, CA-based vice president/general manager of products and innovation for VeriSign.

"Frankly, we think we'll see a lot more of that next year, with more brands placing targeted ads for promotions and packages," he said. "Next year, we believe we'll see the Valentine's Day marketing push start two-to-four weeks early, just like florists do.

"We expect to see that in the mobile space as well."

The company projects a total of more than 1.7 billion inter-carrier SMS messages in North America will be delivered through VeriSign and other messaging providers.

When combined with intra-carrier messaging and the delivery across VeriSign's and other networks, the company projects approximately 3.5 billion messages will be delivered on Feb. 14.

VeriSign's Messaging and Mobile Media Division delivers messages on behalf of carriers and content providers around the world.

VeriSign's combined mobile messaging networks -- P2P and A2P -- connect to more than 700 carriers in over 200 countries and reach more than 3 billion wireless subscribers.

VeriSign offers mobile messaging delivery engines across carrier, enterprise, and media/entertainment networks.

Together with RealNetworks, it powers inter-carrier mobile messaging for eight of the top 10 wireless carriers in North America and various other carriers worldwide.

2008 finished strongly for mobile messaging, according to the company.

VeriSign's Messaging and Mobile Media Division, together with RealNetworks, reached a new milestone when its inter-carrier SMS mobile messaging network delivered more than 1.1 billion messages on Christmas Day, breaking its previous single-day record.

A week later, the company continued to deliver massive message volumes when it again shattered the 1 billion barrier for a single day on New Year's Eve.

In Q4 2008, VeriSign saw a 22 percent increase in total A2P/P2P messages carried from the previous quarter, with a total of more than 224 billion messages for the year.

This corresponds to more than $2.6 Billion in revenue enabled for VeriSign customers in Q4 2008, and a total of over $8.3 billion enabled for all of 2008.

In Q4 2008, the number of messages enabled by VeriSign's combined mobile messaging networks was approximately 772 million per day, on average.

This is nearly a 22 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 120 percent rise over Q4 2007.
In total, VeriSign delivered 219 Billion P2P and more than 5 Billion A2P messages in 2008. This represents a year-over-year growth of 137 percent and 58 percent respectively.

VeriSign, together with RealNetworks, also delivered a single day high of 1.1 billion inter-carrier SMS messages on Christmas Day and a single hour peak of more than 82 Million messages when the clock struck 12 on New Year's Eve.

VeriSign continues to expand. In Q4 2008, the company signed with SK telink, an international telecommunications carrier in South Korea. This, coupled with the addition of customers throughout CALA and APAC, is part of VeriSign's expansion strategy.

VeriSign projects that more than 320 billion messages will be carried on its platform in 2009.

During the fourth-quarter, the VeriSign Inter-Carrier MMS platform realized the most significant rise in traffic volume from the previous quarter, with an increase of 48 percent.

Growing its international customer base, which includes 100% of the ICMMS market in Brazil, VeriSign delivered a total of more than 1.5 billion MMS messages in 2008, which translates to a year-to-year growth of 127 percent.

PictureMail, VeriSign's MMS service, also saw 85 percent growth from 2007.

VeriSign Mobile Enterprise Services continues see a growing interest in A2P enterprise applications.

The company has seen a 114 percent increase in the total number of messages delivered year-over-year, with nearly 1 billion messages in 2008.

In Q4 2008, PayPal announced a new way for members to add even more security to their PayPal accounts using their mobile phones through SMS functionality provided by VeriSign's Messaging and Mobile Media Division.

VeriSign's growing global mobile banking and financial services customer base now includes seven of the top 10 U.S. banking brands, three of the top five credit card issuers and a global leader in online payment solutions.

Major banking institutions in India also rely on VeriSign to power their mobile banking and alerting services serving more than 129 countries globally.

2008 year-end overview
VeriSign surpassed its original estimates of 200 billion messages delivered in 2008 by an extra 24 billion, but it also saw a 134 percent increase in its total messages delivered from 2007.

In 2008, to further promote greater communication to consumers, VeriSign leveraged its messaging platforms to launch VeriSign Xoomerang, innovative social media platform.

Designed to satisfy the fast-growing number of mobile consumers who use online social networking and media destinations, Xoomerang lets consumers view, publish and interact with online destinations.

To date, VeriSign has captured more than 60 percent of the U.S. inter-carrier SMS market share, and in 2008 brought onboard a number of key international customers such as MTN International Carrier Services, covering selected MTN properties in Africa.

"These numbers continue to underline the growth trend in terms of this type of mobile messaging traffic, and it's become more accepted among mobile marketers and advertisers, as it helps them serve ads and measure the success of those ads more effectively," Mr. Landry said.

"In addition to sending 'I love you' text messages on Valentine's Day, we're seeing accelerating adoption among enterprises, especially in the financial services area for mobile banking and remittances.
"It's a better way to increase intimacy with their customer base," he said. "As for mobile marketing via SMS, it's still pretty early days in the market, but we do see marketers in terms of brands and enterprise companies running contests and promoting their brands using the mobile channel.

"What we're going to start to see now, working with our partners like 4info, using advertising to help them reach their subscribers by embedding ads in SMS, as that part of the mobile space reaches maturity and really starts to drive some volume."