Over the last year, ShopText has provided Hearst's CosmoGIRL with code-enabled advertising so that readers can text to buy items or receive promotions from advertisers. The effort has been an overwhelmingly success—one issue last year resulted in 100,000 sent texts. With advertisers struggling these days to find new ways to not only capture their target audience's attention, but also motivate them to action, the CosmoGIRL/ShopText partnership is a very successful case study in advertiser engagement.

Hoping to build on the success of the project, Hearst plans to experiment with some of its other titles, including Good Housekeeping and Oprah's magazine O. It’s a smart strategy if you consider the latest predictions from eMarketer, which forecasts spending on mobile advertising text platforms to more than triple over the next five years. While $1.47 billion was spent in 2007, eMarketer estimates that promotions and ad placements will grow to $4.5 billion by 2012.

These are big numbers, but I'm still not sold that the texting platform will translate to the Good Housekeeping and O demographics. Readers of CosmoGIRL are completely immersed in texting as an integral part of their social interaction with peers. The same can't be said of the predominantly older readers of Good Housekeeping and O.

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