A couple months ago, I wrote about red tape in mobile marketing. The basic conclusion was that while sometimes it feels evil, it is necessary due to the fact that the mobile delivery channel is proprietary across a few carriers and because messaging bears hard costs for some.Good grief! I was sure I would be forced to eat my words. More red tape! Duplicate red tape! What are they thinking??? But, I reserved judgment until we had actually participated in the new processes. Here is my assessment.
Any additional red tape is no fun. None of us got into marketing to fill out forms. We do it to put together great campaigns and get real results for our clients. Paperwork (with virtual or real paper) is always going to be there, but the less the better.
It is not so bad… Compared to the original stuff, it is not that bad. It is duplicate information, but this part is mostly just copy-paste. Since it is done online, both the forms and my Web browser make helpful suggestions based on previous entries.
So, this is what it is like to tie your own noose. No, I am not paranoid. But, the stated purpose of this new process is for “third-party auditing” of campaigns. That means you are communicating what to audit against for your campaigns. Come to think of it, if someone has to tie my noose, I guess I am a pretty good choice – I’m horrible with knots.
Hope for the future. What the new CSCA paperwork does is standardize something that differs across carriers and aggregators in the mobile marketing space. While this is duplicate work for now, we can hope that perhaps this method will become the de facto, centralized standard in the future. It is possible that this era of duplicated paperwork is a simple growing pain in a young, but fast-growing industry.
