SMS Spam
Date of Publishing:31/01/2011
Mehak Chawla writes about the nuisance that SMS blasts have become and the solutions that technology offers to rope in the spam monster
It is the era of instant messaging (IM) and e-mail, push mail and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). However, the humble SMS remains the most popular messaging tool around. Industry analyst firm, Informa Telecoms & Media, in its study Mobile Value Added Services in Growth Markets estimates that there will be 2.5 billion SMS users worldwide by the end of this year as compared to 404 million users for IM and 350 million users for e-mail.
Coinciding with the spectacular rise of the Indian mobile market, SMS spam too has risen uncontrollably in India. The amount of SMS spam has reached an astounding 100 million unsolicited messages a day.
Sonal Mehra, a user, complained, “I get at least 10-15 spam messages a day. Most of them are from builders and property dealers for buying this or that property.”
Gowri Shankar, CEO, SinglePoint corroborated this fact by stating that most mobile advertising is actually nothing but spam.
Ideally, any promotion—be it TV, print, online or mobile—is supposed to create some sort of a brand recall. This is applicable to all mediums.
However, there is one thing that is different about the mobile phone, which is that there are not many options available to be creative. Mobile promotions, therefore, are fairly direct, in terms of offerings and benefits. Without the aid of visuals, they are also quite flat.
Despite all that, mobile advertising is hot. The reasons vary, ranging from target audience to delivery time. Organizations have woken up to this fact with a vengeance.
Is mobile advertising yielding any tangible benefits? That is the question that everyone is shying away from. While the effects of any promotion can't be estimated holistically, there are other things that have gone wrong with mobile promotions in India.
As of now, the conventional route for mobile promotions is this: a company wanting to leverage the mobile medium approaches a VAS company that employs pre-bought gateways from one or multiple service providers to send SMS blasts.
There are a lot of things that are wrong in the way that all this is done. For one, the segmented databases or the target audiences seem to have lost meaning. In advanced mobile markets, there are segregated databases in terms of professionals, businessmen, and even narrow criteria such as gender. However, all you have to do to be a part of the spam SMS chain in our country is to fill in your mobile number at a restaurant that you ate at, a hotel you stayed in or even to a random property dealer.
Do not Disturb
A Do Not Disturb (DND) list seems to be a much abused term and even TRAI has finally acknowledged this fact. Ideally, a customer registers himself on the DND service with the concerned service provider. Service providers, in turn, send these lists to VAS companies and ask them to filter these numbers from the blasts. However, in the Indian scenario, what is happening is that some unscrupulous VAS companies are now selling even these lists to advertisers. The rationale here is that the people who register with DND are considered to be high net worth individuals since they are aware of the service and know how to register. Therefore, these lists provide a ready target audiences for most advertisers, who are ready to cough up more money to lay their hands on the DND lists.
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