Getting spammed by Lakeside Shopping Centre

A few weeks ago I read Helen’s post about Lakeside Shopping Centre.  Lakeside used to be the daddy of shopping centres in the South East until Bluewater opened up just across the bridge.  Now it’s been relegated to bit-player in the shopping centre leagues. 

Helen’s story goes like this:

Helen’s company used to provide mobile marketing services to 85,000 customers of the shopping centre.  The company stopped doing business and it’s database was apparently sold to The Mobile Channel ("TMC"). 

The fact that it was probably illegal to sell the database at all (due to the privacy policy in place) was swept under the carpet. I do vaguely remember getting an opt-in message from that company and they sent me quite a few messages in 2001/2 all marked "(TMC)" thus identifying the sender.

Helen then goes on to guess that since The Mobile Channel apparently started doing online consumer surveys, that perhaps Lakeside Shopping Centre are doing their own SMS marketing.  Either way, Helen has been receiving all manner of text updates from the service — without, as far as she knows — giving any permission whatsoever. 

Here’s an example text:

"House of Fraser Lakeside sale starts tomorrow with an extra 10% off sale prices for all Fraser Recognition card holders till Saturday."

I emailed Lakeside’s PR to confirm who was doing their mobile marketing.  Nada. In fact, the email address bounced.  It’s extremely annoying when that happens — there can’t be that much public relations going on if the email address is wrong on the site, eh? 

Anyway I persevered.  I phoned up their PR company, Clarion Communications, and asked to speak to their Lakeside contact. (You know you’re not exactly dealing with a new media sensitive PR company when you google ‘clarion’ and find no mention of them anywhere on the frontpage. Their site is showing a blank yellow screen at the moment.)  The Clarion Lakeside rep was unavailable so I got her email and sent her a query as to who was running Mobile Marketing — ‘was it TMC still?’, I asked.  I just couldn’t believe that a ‘big company’ like Lakeside was operating such a shoddy mobile marketing offering. 

No response — I’ve given it a week or so. 

Helen was good enough to provide the following free consultancy to Clarion Communications who, if they’ve got their blog monitoring working properly, should have picked both Helen’s post and this one up:

1. Measurability.  Helen comments that the unsolicited offers they’ve been sending her don’t have any sort of measuring element (e.g. ‘show this message to get 10% discount).  They’re just firing them out into the blue yonder.

2. Reply path.  This one REALLY WINDS ME UP.  The absolute numbskulls have set the originator of the message to ‘Lakeside’.   This is a really good example of either a know-nothing or a complete idiot.  Texting is two way.  By default it’s two way.  People want and expect to reply.  And especially, people WANT to reply to opt out.  You obviously cnanot reply if the originator is set to a text field like ‘Lakeside’.  As Helen comments:

I have zero opportunity of opting out. I tried telling them about this a couple of years ago to no avail. Come on guys – haven’t you heard of the Data Protection Act or best practice mobile marketing? Are you too tight to offer a ‘stop’ function?

Clueless, I suspect.  Who runs this?  I’ve no idea. Perhaps the same bright spark who thought it would be a good idea to secure www.lakeside.uk.com as their official domain name.  Who else on the planet uses a uk.com? 

There’s a lot more smart advice on her post. 

It’s such a shame to see mobile marketing executed badly.