WEEKLY COMMENT: ICSTIS gets off on the right foot

An SMS spam campaign launched by the company was the cause of 'hundreds' of complaints after sending prize-winning texts out to thousands of mobile numbers; a promotion that would have generated huge costs via the premium rate manner in which people could claim their prizes.

ICSTIS (the Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services), the regulator of such things, decided to take a stand against this, the first SMS spam 'scandal' to make the national papers, after hitting Mobile Monkey with a £50,000 fine. The punishment appears particularly corporal after a glance at the MobileMonkey.com website reveals: "The company behind this website have failed to pay for it and other work associated with it, despite a Court Judgement that they should do so. As a consequence this site has been suspended until payment is received."

The ground has therefore been laid out and it is an indication of how aware mobile marketers are that the main issue threatening their industry's future is unsolicited promotional messages. We can't agree with the extreme view that spam of any form will not be accepted by mobile users; 'incremental' growth is the key issue here, since, as the odd message will become the majority of messages, users will become used to receiving and deleting unrequested promotions. However, the odd message that appears that is considered interesting by a user will dilute the annoyance generated by others - this is the way of advertising in all its forms.

Yet ICTIS's stand is a crucial one since mobile marketing faces a different set of challenges to other established forms of promotion, including email. This is because mobile development is still tied up in users' minds as being a problematic one following the humiliating failure of WAP to deliver on its promises. Reaction to the inevitable increase in mobile-based promotions is liable to generate a fiercer response, not only because someone's mobile is more sacred than their email, but because the wireless industry already has a poor reputation for meeting customers' needs. As mobile marketers are sensibly aware, they must balance their need to promote with the more generic need to avoid offence very carefully.

It is for this reason that we can assume the news of Mobile Monkey's campaign was greeted with some frustration by other, perhaps more reputable, mobile firms. That their careful progress (witness the network operators' gradual expansion of promotional SMS to subscribers) may be set back by such insensitivity will be a constant worry.

However, it is also likely that mobile marketers will also have welcomed sheepishly the opportunity to see just what would happen should a mobile spamming technique be used. The answer has been unequivocal: mobile users will not accept it and nor will the industry's regulator. If any companies had been wondering whether they might be able to get away with it, they now know better.

But it is incumbent upon ICSTIS to maintain such high standards and for the industry to accept them in both letter and spirit. For, undoubtedly, people's tolerance levels will drop. Just as the once insufferable pop-up is now standard website fare, so SMS (and MMS) spam will become a cost of mobile ownership; spam filters we can expect to soon become as common on our phones as our email accounts.

The growth of SMS spam will be justified just as all other forms are: 'as long as it is well-targeted', 'it is fine if it fulfils a specific customer need' and so on. This argument is fair enough to a point. But spam messages will dilute those promotions that are well-targeted. Were ICSTIS to continue its admirable response to the recent scandal, the exasperation we all now feel with email spam can be avoided in the mobile world, and, for this, the next {3G} generation will surely thank us.

29 August 2002:

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