Following up on yesterday's post about how mobile ads increase brand value, MediaPost reports that the number of brands considering message-based (SMS and MMS) mobile marketing campaigns has doubled over the past year and a half, according to new survey data from Airwide Solutions.

Increasingly, brands are seeing SMS and MMS messaging campaigns as a way to drive both requests for more information and financial transactions--bolstered 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, according to the report.

There are still infrastructure issues to contend with, however. Jay Seaton, Airwide's CMO, said that brands are very interested in these campaigns, but then balk at how expensive and complicated they are to launch. Carriers, in turn, are working to upgrade their network capacity.

"[Carrier] networks are optimized for average peer-to-peer messaging traffic, not millions of messages being blasted all at once for shows like American Idol," Seaton said in the article. "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."

Brands Increase Interest In Mobile Campaigns: Survey [MediaPost]