Mobile spam can kill the golden goose

COMMUNICATION

For the last two months, I am being spammed almost consistently by all sorts of content providers, promising all forms of enticing downloads to links, ranging from the usual ringtones and caller tunes to games and Bollywood wallpapers. The frequency is not so much that I go after the sender, whose identity is mostly a mystery, with a vengeance but enough to get me irritated and thinking.

Until very recently, I believed like most others that mobile marketing was the ultimate medium when it came to connecting with consumers. You know the theory; device always with consumer whether at home or on a south Pacific island (where there is GSM roaming), consumer will always read, whether he or she acts on that information or not. SMS texting or WAP messaging (the kind being currently dumped on me) are in the intimate, personal domain. And so on.

That's precisely my problem. The more I think of it, the more I feel that this is one medium that is not going to work wonders for marketers. On the contrary, the more you `market' to me, the more I will feel like throttling you. Before I illustrate further, let me draw an analogy with mail spam.

Every morning, I power up my computer, open up Microsoft Outlook and go through my mail. Of which roughly 3-5 per cent is pure, unadulterated spam.

The good thing about most spam mail (offers from wealthy Tanzanian refugees to part with their money to wide ranging medicines to bolster your you-know-what life) is that it arrives mostly in batches between 3 am and 5 am local time and I can, with a single flick of the mouse and keyboard, erase it permanently. Till the next batch of course.

Not so with mobile spam. It actually hits me all the time in local time. Actually, god help the sender if it comes at 3 am. The beeps/vibrations interrupt everything, from meetings to movies, since I am forced to examine the phone to see whether someone is really trying to reach me. Worse, erasing messages involve effort, particularly the image-attached, WAP pushed ones.

Net result, I want to scream. The peculiar problem here is, I don't know who at. The messages come without phone numbers, rather just the identity of the company, product or mostly, Bollywood movie in question. Unlike my MS Outlook, I cannot install spam blockers or report spam for future blockage (like public mail utilities Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo allow you to). I could find out the identity of one sender if I got onto the phone with my service provider. But what about the next 1,020 ? And I am pretty sure there is no definitive block-all-spam or block-some-spam instruction possible at the service provider's end. At least for now.

So, it will be a while before legislative and technical solutions are found to this problem. The sooner they are the better; misuse of this medium can kill the message. The only bright side is that I can say I don't check my SMSs because I am being spammed royally "� an excuse I couldn't get away with earlier

(govindraj@business-standard.com)