AMERICAN GREETINGS SIGNS MOBILE CONTENT DEAL WITH FUN TEXT
Messaging services provider signs for social expression content
DATE: 14 July 2008
Mobile messaging service provider Fun Text today announces that it has signed a content deal with social expression content giant American Greetings. Under the deal, Fun Text will roll out American Greetings’ content on its mobile emotional messaging service. The deal includes access to a portfolio of Smiley, wink and emoticon content which has generated over 600 million downloads for MSN and other Instant Messenger services on the web.
Fun Text is a new mass-market mobile messaging medium that combines the richness of MMS with the ease of use of SMS. The platform enables users to quickly and easily add rich media to their text messages for emotional expression. Fun Text represents a new category of everyday communication in-between user-generated photo-messaging and SMS – ‘emotional messaging’ - where users can deploy professionally created content within messages to clearly express emotional statements.
The Fun Text service is already available on the portals of several major operators and the company recently announced that its service would be integrated into handsets on Sprint and the 3UK network. By broadening the range of content available to customers for use in their Fun Text messaging, this deal will further enhance the range of statements and emotions that users can convey across the service.
James Pycock, Business Development Director at Fun Text, said: "With a creative studio of nearly 1000 people and hundreds of thousands of carefully crafted items of messaging content, American Greetings is the world’s largest publicly owned provider of social expression media and a great partner for Fun Text. Our users want to be able to express themselves using the broadest possible range of images and video in their Fun Text messages and the American Greetings content we’re introducing will do just that."
Armando Avila, VP Europe American Greetings, said: "Fun Text is a unique way for people to deploy professionally created content within person-to-person mobile messaging and so represents a fantastic opportunity for us to leverage our content on the medium. We’ve already had over 600 million downloads of this sort of content for instant messenger on PC and we see mobile as a massive opportunity for us going forward."
Founded in 1906, American Greetings serves 125,000 retail outlets as well as 30 million visitors a month to web ecard sites. The company generates $1.7 billion of annual sales and includes brands such as Carlton Cards.
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About AG Interactive
AG Interactive (AGI), a subsidiary of American Greetings Corporation (NYSE: AM), is a global leader in licensing and creating original self and social expression products for online, instant messaging and mobile platforms. To create its premier content, the company leverages one of the world's largest creative studios and digital library of award-winning expressive content as well as an extensive international distribution capability. AGI attracts more than 30 million unique visitors per month in 18 countries to its popular websites http://www.kiwee.com, http://www.AmericanGreetings.com, http://www.BlueMountain.com, and http://www.Egreetings.com as well as through Instant Messaging or online partnerships with AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!. The company has one of the largest online subscription services with over 3.6 million paying subscribers. For more information, visit http://www.aginteractive.com.
About American Greetings Corporation
American Greetings Corporation (NYSE: AM) is one of the world's largest manufacturers of social expression products. Along with greeting cards, its product lines include gift wrap, party goods, stationery, calendars, ornaments and electronic greetings. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, American Greetings generates annual net sales of approximately $1.7 billion. For more information, visit http://corporate.americangreetings.com.
About Fun Text
Fun Text is a new mobile messaging service that enables users to quickly and easily add rich media to their text messages for emotional expression. Users can add Fun Text images to their messages through an online content store integrated into the handset's messaging menu structure. Fun Text combines the richness of MMS with the ease of use of SMS.
Fun Text represents a new category of messaging in-between user-generated photo-messaging and SMS – 'emotional messaging' - where users can deploy professionally created content within messages to clearly express emotional statements. MMS is generally used occasionally for sending camera phone pictures and SMS is used regularly for brief, 'functional' statements – Fun Text creates a new, high traffic, emotional communication medium as an alternative to both.
Fun Text drives MMS traffic, leveraging historic infrastructure investments for operators. The 'emotional messaging' category gives users new contact opportunities and reasons to send MMS, driving traffic over existing MMS infrastructure. Trials of the Fun Text handset application suggest it can drive an MMS uplift of over 50%.
Fun Text is being adopted by some of the world's leading operators. The handset-based application recently launched on 3 in the UK and the service already powers portal-based WAP messaging applications for operators like T-Mobile O2 and Sprint. Fun Text is a proven technology and consumer proposition that has demonstrated significant revenue uplift for operators.
For more information:
Patrick Herridge
Parys Communications
0207 622 9951