Mobile marketing: Mayberry or the Wild West?

Protect consumers and you protect the opportunity. That maxim applies to mobile marketing, where U.S. expenditures on mobile marketing for 2009 are $ 1.7 billion, according to MMA research. This prediction is expected to grow by about 26 percent to $2.16 billion next year.

Like any other booming industry, mobile marketing is attracting hordes of newcomers, some of which don't know or don't care about the rules designed to protect consumers. In the process, these companies risk ruining both the user experience and the market opportunity.

Today the mobile marketing industry is at a crossroads. One path leads to the electronic equivalent of Mayberry, a boom town where consumers gladly shop along a Main Street free of hucksters. The other path leads to the Wild West, a backwater where con artists outnumber consumers and reputable merchants.

Here's an example of the latter: A company sends unsolicited text messages offering a free ringtone to recipients who click on a link in the message. They get the ringtone--and a nasty surprise: By clicking on the link, they've unwittingly subscribed to a $9.99 per month service that sends daily horoscopes and jokes.

When their cell phone bill arrives, they see the charge and try to figure out how to cancel the service. Assuming that they can even find the company's contact information, there's also a good chance that by then, the company has closed its doors and reopened elsewhere under another name.

The choice is clear: community policing now, before problems get out of hand.

Law of the land

It would be cliché to say that there's a new sheriff in town because he's been around for several years: the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), making the mobile channel safe for consumers and brands alike by publishing references such as U.S. Consumer Best Practices (CBP) Guidelines for Cross-Carrier Mobile Content Services.

Industry-standard rules have two main benefits: First, they enable self-policing, where reputable brands, marketers, software developers and other companies use the guidelines to ensure that they're protecting consumers. The rules are particularly handy now because of the way that the mobile channel is rapidly evolving, creating new opportunities--and risks--almost weekly.

The second benefit is that a single set of rules makes compliance easier, faster and less expensive for all members of the mobile marketing ecosystem. Rulebooks such as the MMA's Consumer Best Practices literally put everyone on the same page in terms of guidelines for cross-carrier mobile content services such as text messaging (SMS), multimedia messaging (MMS), shortcode programs, mobile Web and interactive voice response (IVR)...Continued

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