A few days ago Yahoo announced that they were now offering a service whereby you could receive RSS updates as SMS alerts on your cellphone/mobile device. While this sounds very cool for people who always need to be in the know with the latest information I wonder if anyone has really considered what an incredible opportunity this is for advertisers.

Look at it this way. There have been many many companies who have experimented in some form or another with delivering ads to cellphones. But all those ad servings are, I believe, based on the sum of an equation that's determined what might be interesting to users based on their previous habits. If a user is able to subscribe to an RSS feed from, say, General Motors, they could have those updates appear on their cellphone. The follow-through rate on that would likely be high because it's advertising that the user has chosen to allow and which they had to take positive action to receive.

Imagine how much of a boon it would be for both advertisers and Yahoo if all these companies suddenly started adding "Add To My Yahoo" chicklets on their sites that would power these SMS updates? The company would be able to tell exactly who was subscribing, Yahoo would gain loyal users and the end viewer would get only those messages relevant to them. Even better for the company involved is that the cost of delivering these would be almost nothing. After the creation of the creative the delivery is all just pushing content to an RSS feed and that can't cost much. Even on a big scale of delivery the cost would be worth it because, unlike even advertising within the RSS feed of another site or other broad-reacing ad strategies, they would be reaching a highly influenceable audience.