I was flipping through radio stations the other day and heard a competition where they were giving away some kind of promotional item. I do think it was something big, but I forget what. What caught my attention was that they were looking for the 10 thousandth text messenger as the winner. That’s a pretty big number overall. I wonder how long it took for them to get to 10K. I didn’t think about it till later otherwise I might have actually left the radio on to find out. I got the impression though that it was something pretty short.

I know there are services out there that run this stuff, manage the offer on behalf of the radio stations and deal with all the technical setup. Not that I can find one right now to link to, but I know I’ve run across them before. I wonder what the cost is though. In only a few instances have I found SMS services where the provider has negotated free messaging out of the carriers in return for driving traffic. The operators here in the US make money every time a subscriber gets or sends a message, so I would think that driving 10k revenue generating messages through their networks would be something that carriers would be happy about. But there’s all sorts of issues to deal with, not least of all that the networks over the air interface doesn’t deal with burts traffic very well.

Anyone have any idea what the overall cost is to run a campaign of about this size in the US?