SMS Marketing: What are the applications?

I've been thinking about this recently, prompted by various discussions, and by reading the blogs of mobilists.

The demographics of text messaging are not wholly biased towards youth, but they do seem mostly youth biased. And, while youth has money, the grey cash from my generation is a huge and untapped pool. Sure, we have major commitments, too, but we also tend to have larger salaries because of longer time served, if nothing else.

Texting is a weird thing. My son will text rather than phone me even though his phone contract gives him unlimited free minutes between our phones. Text seems to appeal to him because he has no need to interact. The message is transactional, and one way only. No discussion.

So, I know why texting appeals to him, both to send and receive, with his peers and his family. I also know that he hates managing text messages in his phone's memory, and gets fed up when the memory is full because he loses inbound texts. He also likes receiving his bank balance by text. Well, me too.

I'm guessing, based on a sample of one, that he is pretty normal in his phone habits.

So, what advertising applications would appeal to him, and, come to that, to me?

• Gig ticket availability, though the gigs he goes to have often sold out the second internet booking opens, and that date and time is well publicised in advance. An interesting application there for ticket touts, though!
• Flight availability based on the timeframe for travel
• Special offers from stores, probably online stores, that are time critical
• Immediate and practical information about an initerary.
  

There'll be more of those. Maybe, just maybe, we could get a discussion going in the comments?

What do I not want?

• Generic information that I could have just as easily and more fully by email. Your trade puffery has no place in my phone
• Any message that costs me money to receive. Ringtones are ringtones. I can live with the Nokia Tune if I have to. And a paid for screensaver is..... ridiculous. As for the crunchy frog.... Ok, crazy frog....
• Obsolete information. Text messages do not always arrive the moment they're sent. Sometimes there are huge delays
• Information for a part of the world I am not in, unless I opt for it.
• Any unsolicited information. Yes I know Europe has 2002/58/EC and the UK has the PECR, but people use offshore centres for this and weasel around the law.

I do not want political messages. Tomorrow, in the UK, we have local elections. Luckily there is no "spam exemption" for political parties or I could envisage batphone meltdown as a load of "Vote for Baines" messages start arriving in double quick time. The world does not have sufficient Astroglide to allow us to use mobile phones as suppositories for over enthusiastic candidates! Come to that, with Astroglide's leaky website....

You can start to see what interests me and what does not. Since SMS marketing absolutely has to be permission based then it is no surprise to know that I, not you, will regulate what appears on my phone. Your issue is to interest me in your offering so much that I want to receive texts from you.

But I am often in the car, driving. Text messages arriving while I'm driving are a major annoyance. I may not pick up my phone and read them. I'd not only be a total idiot, I'd break the law and risk penalty points on my licence and a fine. Stopping the car and reading a text message only to find it is one that was not time critical is going to result in my unsubscription immediately because you are more trouble than you are worth. And that includes alerts like "there is a traffic jam on the M25", even if they are helpful, because I am on the M6 and heading north, or I have already hit the M25 jam.

You can see I'm trying to puzzle out applications for SMS marketing. I'm always happy to have extra thought, even huge disagreement. What's your take on it? Where is it a good thing? And why?