Text messaging has quietly become one of the highest-performing channels available to advertisers, and two industries in particular are leaning into it hard right now: political campaigns and home services. Both have good reasons to. Neither can afford to treat compliance as an afterthought.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Why SMS Is Pulling Ahead
The numbers explain the shift. 85.6% of consumers are now opted in to texts from businesses, up nearly 40% from 2021, and the A2P (application-to-person) SMS market is projected to hit $100 billion in 2026. That’s not a niche channel anymore, it’s approaching table stakes.
Political campaigns have found it especially cost-effective. Some campaigns report saving tens of thousands of dollars compared to traditional outreach methods by shifting GOTV and fundraising touches to text. Home services advertisers are drawn to it for a different reason: SMS is built for the exact moment a homeowner needs a plumber, an HVAC tech, or a roofer, immediate, high-intent, and mobile by default. A missed call gets ignored. A text gets read within minutes.
The Part That Actually Determines Whether This Works
Here’s what doesn’t show up in the growth stats: SMS compliance has gotten meaningfully stricter, and both political and home services advertisers sit closer to the enforcement spotlight than most other categories.
The baseline requirements, regardless of industry:
- Prior express written consent before sending any marketing text. Not implied consent, not a pre-checked box, actual documented opt-in.
- A2P 10DLC registration at both the brand and campaign level. Unregistered traffic increasingly just doesn’t get delivered, major carriers now block effectively 100% of unregistered A2P traffic.
- Quiet hours compliance, generally 8am to 9pm in the recipient’s local time zone.
- Immediate opt-out handling, STOP replies have to actually stop the messages, not get queued for manual review.
- Clean content, carriers filter aggressively for prohibited categories.
What’s Different for Political Texting Specifically
Political campaigns face an extra registration layer. Most political senders now need to verify their identity through Campaign Verify, a nonpartisan service that confirms a campaign against its FEC ID or state and local filings and issues a token carriers recognize. Skip that step and messages simply won’t reach inboxes at any real scale, carriers have gotten far more aggressive about filtering unverified political traffic.
What’s Different for Home Services
Home services campaigns tend to run afoul of TCPA rules in a more mundane way: volume and automation. Appointment reminders, service follow-ups, and promotional blasts often get sent through auto-dialing or bulk-sending platforms, and that’s exactly the category of technology that still carries real liability even after recent legal developments narrowed some TCPA claims. Consent needs to be tracked per number, per campaign, and per use case, not assumed to carry over from a service call to a marketing list.
The 2026 Change Worth Knowing About
A January 2026 update requires one-to-one consent, meaning consent can no longer be shared across brands or sold to third parties. Each sender has to obtain its own consent directly from each consumer. This closes what had been a well-known lead-generator loophole, where one opt-in on a form could quietly authorize texts from a dozen unrelated companies. If your lead sources still operate on the old model, that’s worth auditing now, not after a complaint.
The Stakes Are Real, Not Theoretical
TCPA violations carry statutory damages of $500 to $1,500 per message, with no cap on total liability, and a single unauthorized text is enough to create a legal claim. Recent settlements make the exposure concrete: Athena Bitcoin agreed to a $4.5 million settlement over unsolicited promotional texts, and a Farmers Insurance settlement topped $2.87 million over similar claims. Those aren’t small or unusual companies, they’re a reminder that this applies at any scale.
There was one piece of good news for advertisers this year: a Seventh Circuit ruling in July narrowed one specific path consumers could use to sue over unwanted marketing texts. That’s a meaningful development, but it doesn’t touch the core rule: if a campaign uses auto-dialing or similar automated sending technology without proper consent, liability still stands. This isn’t the moment to get comfortable.
Where We’d Start
Before launching or scaling any SMS program, especially in political or home services, we’d want three things confirmed: documented one-to-one consent for every number on the list, current 10DLC brand and campaign registration (with Campaign Verify completed for political use cases), and a clean, immediate opt-out process that’s actually been tested, not just documented in a policy nobody’s checked in six months.
SMS still outperforms almost every other channel available right now. It just requires getting the unglamorous part right first.
If you want a second set of eyes on your SMS program before you scale it, that’s a conversation worth having.
