Mobile marketing versus spam

I just received an intriguing research paper entitled: “Spamming and mobile marketing: get it right”. Now to many users the notion that there is a nice balance to be made between spam and marketing is a nonsense. All marketing, they feel, is essentially spam, junk mail, unsolicited solicitations, if you will.

The author of the paper, Rebecca Ong of the School of Law, at the City University of Hongkong, in Kowloon, argues that there is a distinction. “New technological advancements [the internet, SMS, smart phones etc] have brought unique benefits to marketing including low costs of entry in distributing information and media to the global market.” She points out that when compared to the traditional medium of marketing such as print, media, radio and television, new forms of marketing medium incorporating technological advancements provide even greater benefits to the marketing and advertising industry.”

The key phrase is “greater benefits to the marketing and advertising industry”, not to the user, mark you.

Now, I admit and you will know, if you’re not running Adblock Plus or NoScript in your browser, that Sciencetext is partially financed by advertising, occasionally offers freebies (for which the site may get a kickback) and has a partner tech jobs and careers section that, if it were actually getting any traffic, might pay a few cents into the coffers. So, I perhaps cannot argue against mobile marketing.

That said, it’s your choice as to whether you visit this site, and like I say there are tools available to hide ads so that your experience of the site can be as clean as you wish. There are anti-Adblock tools available to webmasters, but I’m not so mean as to implement those. Moreover, I think it would alienate the particularly tech-focused readers among you.

By contrast, an unsolicited text message on my mobile phone is simply an annoyance, there is no two ways about it. Regardless of the content of the ad, I don’t want to receive it on my phone and I suspect most of you feel the same. We all get enough mobile missives, what with email being almost ubiquitous now, and Twitter and Facebook updates piped straight to our mobiles 24/7.

Ong does seem to agree to some extent in her concluding remarks. We do treat our mobile communications devices as intimate personal belongings in much the same way we treat our cars, homes, and pets, even.

As such, she says, they must given the necessary respect. This leaves the marketing and advertising industry with having to be invited into the consumers’ personal space rather than merely inundating consumers with the unwanted information. Marketing campaigns must therefore be carefully designed so as not be regarded as being intrusive or to lend itself to indiscriminate marketing. Without doubt, campaigns will be regarded more positively if they are designed to be personal, simple, entertaining and incentive based to the discerning consumer.

I guess I’d be happy with that, although how an industry that feeds on slicing spam, however you cut it, will achieve that remains to be seen.

Ong, R. (2010). Spamming and mobile marketing: get it right International Journal of Intercultural Information Management, 2 (1) DOI: 10.1504/IJIIM.2010.030710