This week the mobile marketing association has finally come out with its code of conduct for marketing through a mobile phone. We wonder just how robust that code of conduct will be. As mobile marketing picks up speed over the coming years, this code of conduct will be sure to be tested.
We already know that Spam on email has been impossibly difficult to erase, without the potentially disastrous effect of false positives ‘ deleting emails that are from people that don’t usually email you ‘ which can often mean not receiving purchase orders, customer enquiries and emergency domestic emails.
For sure anyone that gets a lot of spam and also has a Blackberry, already knows how much time and data charges are wasted paying for someone else’s illegal email blast. Not only will the Mobile Marketing Association need to do a better job than the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) it had better have a good way to go about its enforcement.
There is the potential for disaster here. Email alerts could ring every time your handset polls email only to find it stuffed with spam; location based advertising could leap out at you every time you go past the same row of restaurants on the way home from work, and hyperlocal social networks could have members you don’t know wanting to swap music with you every few hundred yards ‘ all of them making your handset beep to the point where you simply no longer want the machine turned on. Applications will have to be very carefully written an compliance with the code of conduct will become exceptionally important ‘ except that for now the members are supposed to police their own activity ‘ at least until a third party compliance force can be set into place. Oh, oh!
Which is perhaps why the Mobile Marketing Association wanted buy-in and agreement and best practice from all over the world and its counterparts in AsiaPacific, Latin American as well as across EMEA, before setting the principles in stone. Next step will be compliance.
The key principles are that whoever is marketing must say who they are and state their terms and conditions; that there must be a simple opt in and opt out process for obtaining a device owner’s consent to send marketing materials; that while it is fine to use user information in order to select the right marketing messages, this data must be held responsibly and used sensitively; and security must be up to the job of making sure that access is authorized and user data is protected.
So accidentally picking up a program through email which then sets all your mobile settings to ‘accept everything’ and opens your browser to start downloading porn pop-ups, should not happen, especially on your 10 year old’s handset. We’ll see.
It is very early days yet in mobile marketing, and one suspects that enforcement will be different from the PC, in that every device is already identifiable, and therefore unwanted or illegal marketing can be tracked ‘ except that fixed lines aren’t; that the device is actually owned in many cases by the operator, so it can download whatever software it likes to ensure these principles ‘ but that process could be a weapon for the hacker too; and that the moment marketing detracts from using the handset properly the operator will come down on it like a ton of bricks, or risk losing their ARPU ‘ if it knows what’s wrong.
But opening up the PC to become more than just a word processor meant that we had to accept the arrival of virus checkers, firewalls, secret passwords, and untraceable abuse, so we will now have to see what hacking genius there is out there that will apply itself to spamming or loading Trojans into handsets.
The Privacy Committee which developed the code included input from Acxiom, Ad Infuse, AOL, AT&T, Chapell & Associates, iLoop Mobile, InfoSpace, ipsh!, Microsoft, Motricity, Neustar, Pelago, Procter & Gamble, Qualcomm, Safecount, TxtGroups, US Cellular, VeriSign, Verizon, Vindigo, Wired Assets, Xiam, Yahoo! and Zoove.