The Lunch Pail

Talk with mobile marketers over a beer and you might hear a couple gripes about all of the hoops we spend time jumping through in order to get SMS campaigns live and messages out. But, why, in the age of Twitter, microwave baking, and dual onboard DVD players – when everything is immediate - is there so much red tape? Why so many hurdles when so many other tactics are basically laissez-faire?

One reason (and perhaps the most cynical explanation depending on your point of view) is that unlike the Internet and email, the distribution channel for SMS is owned and controlled by a few companies. Unlike the open standards and loose regulation prevalent on the Internet, each carrier makes its own set of standards for how SMS and MMS messages should be sent on their networks.

While it’s tempting and easy to blame red tape on large companies, the simple fact that this oligopoly exists doesn’t account for the red tape. So why?

A better (and less cynical) explanation is the responsibility these carriers take, on behalf of their customers, to act as a gatekeeper to prevent fraud and spam. Unlike email, SMS messages can incur a per-message cost to the recipient. Premium services can also be purchased using SMS, allowing the charges to be placed on the customer’s phone bill. Both of these are situations where their customers are exposed to the possibility of fraud, and they want to protect their customers.

In addition, the carriers want to be sure their customers aren’t receiving unwanted text messages (spam, or m-spam) because these cause unwanted fees to be charged, thereby devaluing the overall product the carriers are trying to produce.

At this point, the cynic in you is probably saying, “Yeah, but they only do that so they save money by paying fewer customer service people to haggle over text message bills.”

Perhaps. But, to show you how serious the carriers are, Verizon recently sued a company that allegedly “sent at least 800,000 wireless spam messages promoting mortgage products to Verizon Wireless customers.” They’ve taken a tough stance against m-spam with this and about 10 other lawsuits. This will likely benefit all customers across all carriers. In addition, a spam-free mobile landscape will benefit mobile marketers by keeping the signal-to-noise ratio favorable in the mobile space.

If we ever have a beer and talk about it, I still won’t pretend I’m happy about the red tape involved in getting a mobile campaign off the ground. But, when I think about what the mobile marketing experience would be if mobile spam were to become rampant, I get it. I totally get it.