Nielsen: Obama’s Biden announcement delivered to 2.9M cellphones

Barack Obama has added one more record to his historic bid for the White House.
Nielsen Mobile estimates that 2.9 million mobile subscribers received the Democratic Illinois senator’s text message announcing Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), as his choice for VP, according to a news release.
Nielsen Mobile said the amount of messages that were sent out Saturday and Sunday is the single largest mobile marketing event in the United States to date.
The Obama campaign and Distributive Networks, which is the company handling Obama’s text messaging initiative, have declined to say how many messages were sent.
Nielsen Mobile, which is a service of the Nielsen Company, said it was able to calculate its figure because it can monitor shortcode marketing for a panel that reports on the billing activity of 40,000 mobile subscriber lines in the country. The campaign’s shortcode is OBAMA (62262).
Nic Covey, Nielsen Mobile director of insights, said the Obama text message ranks as one of the most important that has ever been sent. The campaign was also able to establish a database of cellphone numbers for supporters and potential voters, who signed up to receive Obama’s VP selection via a text message.
Steven Weber, a political science professor at the University of California Berkeley, said it will be interesting to see if the text messaging campaign has an impact on the November election. He called the Biden text message a “gimmick.”
“It was probably good” for the wireless companies, Weber said.