Text Spam: Mobile Marketing Mindlessness

Link: Marketonomy: Mobile Marketing Mindlessness.
Christopher Kenton of Marketonomy lays into the operators and the Mobile Marketing Association about the subject of text spam.

Text spam used to be a huge issue in the United Kingdom — you used to be able to send text messages for one or two pence each via India and have them delivered, often 24 hours later, to UK handsets. This extremely cheap route into the country was finally ‘plugged’ by the operators a few years ago (from memory). So, in the UK, if you want to send a message, you generally have to do it at market rates — which begins to get quite prohibitive. Doesn’t stop the determined few. However, the recipient doesn’t pay to receive messages.

Completely the opposite in North America depending on what service plan you’ve got and whether the ‘spammer’ (‘marketer’) is routing messages via SMS gateways or via the carrier’s email-to-handset gateway. Generally speaking you pay to receive messages sent to yournumber@verizon.net for example.

Ergo I think Christopher’s comments are well founded. Read on here!

This is the kind of thing that just drives me insane–that proves to me just how stupid and short-sighted businesses and marketers can be, or worse, how cynical.