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It's not Spam! - SMS marketers clean up their image

Cadbury did a very successful SMS based marketing campaign, mailing hundreds of messages to sales prospects. Others would like to follow suit; but is this good for the industry's image? Industry leaders are looking to establish codes of practice.

The US-based Wireless Advertising Association (WAA) and the more UK focused Wireless Marketing Association (WMA) have announced that they will be merging to create the more global "Mobile Marketing Association" (MMA).

The aim of the joint venture is to ensure that cowboy operators don't give SMS marketing gimmicks a bad name, or, even worse, irritate Governments into imposing legal restrictions on who can do what over your cellphone screen.

"The idea is to further our industry, protect privacy, and put a stop to spam," said the organisation's PR department. "It's really to protect both consumer, and the industry."

Officially, this isn't a "response to negativity" because there isn't much. Unofficially, people in the association agree that there are scary trends. "You may have read about people getting SMS messages at 4AM selling things," admitted one official; "we want to curb that sort of thing before it gets too widespread."

It remains to be seen how effective the global association will be. The Internet based anti-Spam bodies claim that unsolicited email is nowhere near as bad as it might have been without their activities; but the fact remains that it is far from obsolete.

One reason SMS (short message spam) is less common, is that it's pretty hard to do. It's perfectly possible - technically - to send an SMS packet from the Internet to a phone network. But in practice, the phone operators tend to want paying - and paying handsomely - before they accept short messages, spam or otherwise, from other networks.

For example, ICQ, an "instant message" service owned by AOL offers an SMS message transmission service from a PC to a mobile phone. It works - as long as you aren't trying to send the message to a Vodafone subscriber. Vodafone simply isn't prepared to accept the message (at this point).

Also, sending SMS is not a guaranteed operation; the message may or may not get through; and it may take a considerable time, especially if the subscriber is "roaming" away from home.

The new MMA says it has "strong links" with the Direct Marketing Association, which regulates junk mail. It clearly isn't setting its sights too high; it's aiming for what can be achieved practically, rather than hoping to eliminate any nuisance. So it remains to be seen how effective it can be.