This article reports the results of a study of permission-based advertising via mobile phones. The study, part of the proof of concept for a UK startup, specifically explored the effectiveness of SMS text messaging as an advertising medium for reaching young adults. The results suggest that, with the right execution, the mobile channel has the potential to benefit both advertisers and consumers. The findings also include some suggestions about when and how to use this emerging new medium. Although confined to SMS text messaging in the UK, the results are also likely to be relevant to other countries, and to more advanced mobile communication technologies as these are rolled out.

There is something very appealing about "data" that convince us that they somehow have an omniscient quality. Data that are generated with the apparent lack of human intervention have an even more magical quality that deters us from questioning them. This mythology around data has been noted by Boyd and Crawford (2012) who considered that there is a:[…] widespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy.Of course, we are all now aware that we are living in the "Big Data" era. "Big" plays an important part in the discourse around data, not least because of the ready supply of statistics concerning the scale of data in today's world. Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California (Hilbert and López, 2011;Hilbert and López, 2012) has attempted to put a number on this growth, estimating that in 2007 the total volume of stored data were 300 exabytes. By 2013, with digital data doubling every three years, he estimates that the amount of stored information in the world now stands at 1,200 exabytes.The scale of Big Data lends itself to highly visual means of description, as described by Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2013):

Can it tell you the ‘what’, the ‘why’ or both?

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