Live8 To Use SMS To Promote Poverty Plan

Live8 LogoIf you haven’t heard, on July 6th the leaders of the worlds eight largest economies will gather together for the G8 Summit…a few days earlier on July 2nd a superconcert called Live8 will be held to petition the leaders to do something about global poverty…they “will be presented with a workable plan to double aid, drop the debt and make the trade laws fair. If these 8 men agree, then we will become the generation that made poverty history”. If you think it’s impossible, the United Nations has estimated that it would take just 0.7% of the GDP of the OECD nations to eliminate world poverty. The aim is to get 20 million people from the expected two billion global TV viewers to “text message (SMS) their footprint and voice to the march to make poverty history”.
It will be a huge technical achievement with concerts in eight different countries and TV viewers from 130. The previous record for the number of SMS sent in a single day is believed to be 1.8 million in Germany, but I think that’s concerning a specific event rather than general SMS’s. Live8 is not asking for money (although they could probably make a pretty penny selling mobile music videos from the concert) just the SMS. The campaign will have a benefit over e-mail campaigns because each SMS can be seen to come from a different mobile, and therefore most likely a different user.
At the moment SMS is the best way to go since the organisers want it to be as inclusive as possible, therefore need it to be suitable for as many handsets as possible…but it has got me wondering what the next step will be when better handsets become more ubiquitous…

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