Access U2’s U.S. Patent No. 7,643,821 (the ‘821 patent) is foundational to the very infrastructure of the mobile advertising industry. Filed in 2005 and issued in 2010, the patent solved critical shortcomings of the state of the art, enabling advertisers to legally collect mobile users’ data and to push to them rich digital content in real-time.

A mobile phone user seeing an advertisement with a phone number or short code number is encouraged to subscribe - “opt-in” - by texting a keyword in the ad to the number. Acting on this “call-to-action” ad, the mobile phone user is now subscribed to automatically receive media-rich-capable messages (text, images, video, etc.) from the ad campaign she just opted into.

See how the ‘821 patent helped enable the mobile ad industry to become what it is today:

According to several industry studies, $75 Billion of US Media Advertising spending will be allocated towards Mobile Ads. Of note, this surpasses TV ($70B) and is significantly more than print ($18B), radio ($14B) and out of home ($8B) advertising combined.

A mobile phone user seeing any short code is given the ability to subscribe (“opt-in”) to the respective advertisement by texting a Keyword to a phone number or short code. From this point forward, this mobile phone subscriber automatically receives media-rich-capable messages (text, images, video, etc.) from the respective campaign that they opted into.