During June and July of this year, Burlington, MA and Reading, UK-based Airwide commissioned European market research firm Vanson Bourne to survey 50 global brands representing products across retail, automotive and technology verticals--among others.

The results were compared to findings from a similar survey conducted in January of 2006--yielding an advertiser-centric view of the future of simple text and multimedia (including video, pictures and coupons) messaging campaigns.

For example, some 28% of brands were considering implementing SMS or MMS campaigns during the next 12 months--double the 14% that had considered the option last year. In terms of spending, 71% of brands expected to devote up to a tenth of their marketing budgets on mobile messaging campaigns within two years--up almost 20% from the respondents who said the same last year.

Brands' own projections for their overall mobile marketing spending were also on the rise. Some 58% of respondents said that their mobile marketing campaign would take up to 15% of their total ad budget within the next five years, and 32% said this would happen by 2009.

The trends also extended to brands' confidence in MMS and SMS campaigns as a way to drive both requests for more information and financial transactions--bolstered no doubt by the widely publicized user response rates to "text to enter" campaigns for shows like Fox's "American Idol" and NBC's "Deal or No Deal."

Just over a third of all respondents said that they expected up to 10% of recipients of mobile marketing messages to "undertake a financial transaction"--with 52% of brands saying the same for recipient requests for "more information or a product sample."

That's not to say that brands perceive mobile marketing campaigns--particularly MMS-based initiatives--as a sure shot for success. Almost half of big brands (46%) are concerned that mobile marketing is too intrusive--and many feel that customers will perceive messages as SPAM. And some 41% of those same respondents were unsure that they could target campaigns specifically enough to avoid that problem.

Meanwhile, over a third of brands (36%) would require detailed information on how the user responded to the message, and about 20% would want definite confirmation that the user's handset had actually received the message.

According to Jay Seaton, Airwide's CMO, MMS faces some of the same challenges that SMS and even newer forms of interactive advertising like rich media ads faced during the periods right before their widespread adoption.

"Right now, for as much hype as there is over mobile marketing--the issues of affordable pricing, interoperability between carriers, ease of use and implementation and ubiquity of user technology have yet to be fully resolved," said Seaton. "Brands are saying 'this is a great idea,' and then hit a phase where it's clearly more expensive and complicated than they expected."

But Seaton said the fact that advertisers are open to implementing these campaigns (and actively trying) is a welcome sign--as it spurs carriers like Vodafone and Verizon to build out the infrastructure necessary to make mobile marketing more accessible.

"We actually have our carrier partners pushing for surveys like this--not the brands," said Seaton. "Their networks are optimized for average peer-to-peer messaging traffic, not millions of messages being blasted all at once for shows like 'American Idol' or typical ad campaigns. And they don't want to invest the millions or billions needed to upgrade their network capacity to handle all those ads if there's no guarantee that it's going to pay off."

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