MMA releases guideline updates

The Mobile Marketing Association today issued revised guidelines for consumer best practices, targeting marketing to children, shortcodes and viral initiatives. The new MMA rules call for participants to observe all laws governing marketing to children, in particular the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which outlines privacy policies, parental consent and age-based marketing restrictions. Mobile content providers may be required to change the advertising language of programs targeted at children to guarantee their marketing efforts are neither inappropriate nor misleading.

The MMA also introduced new rules requiring shortcode program pricing be clearly indicated, with notice provided any charges will appear on a subscriber's wireless bill or deducted from a prepaid balance. When a customer reaches $50 in shortcode charges, an additional opt-in should be required, with opt-ins for every additional $25 incurred thereafter. The association also encourages carriers to implement their own hard caps on shortcode spending.

In addition, the MMA announced restrictions prohibiting automatic forwarding of viral messages via contact lists or address books. The group also banned the forwarding of messages to an Internet domain name assigned to a wireless operator for a mobile messaging service as well as incentives in exchange for a consumer promise to forward a message. However, the MMA will still allow word-of-mouth campaigns in which one subscriber manually enters another's number, forwarding a message to that recipient.

For more on the new MMA regs:
- read this Online Media Daily article

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- MMA updates guidelines