Flytxt built its first mobile-marketing campaign in 2000, focusing on building loyalty clubs for teenagers. A year later, the company got worldwide recognition for its Cadbury's "text and win" promotional campaign, which became a leading example of promotion for consumer goods companies.

Today Flytxt offers variety of mobile-marketing solutions. Pamir Gelenbe, one of Flytxt's founders, says the company was one of the first of its kind.

"We were one of the first players to start building mobile-marketing concepts back in 2000. We have developed a lot of experience in the field and recently we launched a campaign together with operator 3, which enabled its customers to watch a free trailer of the new British cult movie, It's All Gone Pete Tong," Gelenbe says.

Flytxt has three components to its offering: the technology that enables mobile marketing, a mobile agency business and broker services.

The technology includes Flytxt Direct, which is similar to e-mail marketing software. It allows users to manage data, choose groups and monitor mobile campaigns via SMS, MMS or WAP push. It also lets you test campaigns as well as reports. It is a two-way campaign tool that takes care of incoming messages as well.

The second part of the offering is the mobile agency business: if a company wants to run a mobile marketing campaign, Flytxt offers expertise, insight, advice and help to implement it.

The third component is Flytxt's ability to act as a broker between buyers and sellers of mobile advertising.

Perhaps some of Flytxt's more unusual mobile campaigns are the ones for non-commercial organizations, such as Comic Relief and Make Poverty History. The company is now working with the Live 8 concerts, the brainchild of Bob Geldof, which will be held in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Philadelphia on July 2.

"We did the first large-scale fundraising for charity via mobile for Comic Relief, which is the biggest nationwide large-scale fundraising organization in the UK. This year it raised a total of GBP 60 million," Gelenbe says. "All the money is basically used to fight poverty. We have been running two major mobile fundraising campaigns for them; the first raised GBP 500,000 and the second GBP 1 million. They were actually the first times that common short codes were used in the UK and we had to work closely with the operators to manage it."

In a highly successful mobile-marketing campaign with operator Orange, Flytxt has managed to increase the number of movie visitors on Wednesdays in the UK. Wednesday used to be the least popular day for going to the movies in the UK.

"Our concept is built around a loyalty scheme that gives subscribers two tickets for the price of one on Wednesdays. Users can send an SMS with the word film to the short code 2-4-1," Gelenbe says.

"They get an SMS reply including a short code that they can take to almost any cinema in the UK. We have installed redemption terminals in pretty well all the cinemas in the UK, which was a major undertaking. The attendant types the code into the terminal, which is linked via GPRS to our servers, and checks that the code is valid. In the process we also capture user identification, which film they choose, what time of the day it is and at which cinema they will watch the movie. The campaign has been a huge success and Wednesday has now become the second-best day after Friday."

Gelenbe says the future looks promising, and the recent mobile video campaign is proof of that.

"It was actually the first mobile-video advertising campaign in the UK. Our film clients pay us to advertise their films through WAP on 3's portal. We purchase a spot on the portal and when you click on the banner you get to a micro site, which includes the trailer. We are seeing more than 100,000 downloads of the trailers. So that was definitely a flying start for a new business model," Gelenbe says.

Hendrik Bergstén