Unicast inaugurated a new mobile marketing SMS offering as part of its Unicast Rich Media Mobile suite.

The Unicast Rich Media Mobile technology is positioned as a hosted delivery and tracking service for optimized rich mobile Web page content. Adding the Rich SMS feature will allow marketers to create a common brand experience across the online and mobile channels.

"We wanted to provide our Unicast clients with the ability to extend their rich media display campaigns to the mobile world," said Jason McKay, president of Unicast, New York.

"Today it's very difficult to bookmark advertising that interests you online," he said. "If you see something about a product or service that interests you, there's no good way to save it for later when you might have more time to dig deeper.

"With our new SMS feature, users can send that information directly to a mobile device or multiple mobile devices where it can be stored and retrieved later at will."

Unicast is a division of Enliven Marketing Technologies Corp.

The Rich SMS feature will let users send real-time text messages from an online ad to a mobile device, pointing the recipient to a rich mobile microsite where they can watch views and other downloadable content.

Unicast leverages a short code to execute the SMS -- a feature that can be added to any of its products to extend a marketer's campaign to mobile. The mobile microsites are created, served and tracked using Unicast Internet marketing technology.

Unicast creates rich microsites that offer wallpaper downloads, data capture, interactive store locators, movie show times, streaming video, photo galleries and ringtone downloads.

What this does is create consistency across mobile devices and offers a connection between online and mobile marketing campaigns.

On the back-end Unicast offers reporting that includes brand engagement and click-through metrics linked to an advertiser's cross-medium, cross-device ad campaign.

"Clients such as Cadillac, Adidas, Land Rover and others have used our rich mobile microsite solution," Mr. McKay said. "The SMS solution was just released and we are currently working with a number of clients on integrating this feature into their rich media offerings going forward."

Unicast Rich Media Mobile is compatible with many mobile devices sold by wireless carriers such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Sprint. The SMS feature is also available for all Unicast's Premium Rich Media ad formats.

With mobile phones becoming more sophisticated, more marketers are slowly but surely looking at the channel as a marketing medium. So are consumers using the phone not just for talk. Market researcher Gartner Inc. claims that 2.3 trillion text messages will be exchanged this year.

"The use of mobile marketing is still in its infancy," Mr. McKay said. "Overall, only 18 percent of online advertisers used a mobile marketing tactic during the past year, but 34 percent are expecting to do so this year.

"We strongly believe that mobile marketing will become a larger part of a brand's strategy and plan moving forward," he said.