Marketers Afraid Of SMS Spam?
Direct marketers are now saying that they’re afraid too much SMS spam will kill that advertising channel as an effective medium. Well, duh. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a tragedy of the commons issue that happens where each marketer still wants to spam for their own business, and can’t control what all the other millions are doing. The answer, of course, is that they shouldn’t be spamming at all. If they want to use SMS marketing effectively it needs to be clearly opt-in – and not set up in a sneaky way where people opt-in without realizing it. History suggests that direct marketing folks won’t actually live up to this, and they will (no matter what they say) kill the channel by flooding it.
