One of my friends recently raised a concern over all the brouhaha happening over mobile phone advertising. Especially, the fact that GPS enabled phones could be the next target of mobile advertisers in order to cater to the customers with location-specific ads has very much disturbed him. “Location-specific ads are not as easy as you think they are,” he said. “Just because I happen to stand next to a sex shop for some reason, I don’t want to get a text message asking me to use the facilities of the shop at a discounted rate,” he also added. Most importantly, he was not happy that his boss would be able to find him out wherever he goes. Another thing he mentioned was about the safety of the data collected. With incidents like HP Pretexting happening around us, it seems like a very valid point to me.
Actually, the way I look at it, it’s not just my friend who has these apprehensions about location-specific mobile phone advertising. A lot of people would second my friend’s opinion and I don’t find any fault with them. Before a product or service becomes famous, apprehensions like this are bound to surface and the responsibility of the mobile marketers is to make sure the customers know what they are getting into. A full fledged mobile advertising campaign to clarify these doubts could be a solution. But not every mobile marketer would be willing to come up with this sort of an idea. End of the day, we, the customers, need to know whether our data will remain safe, to what extent these location-specific ads can go, and so on and so forth.
My take on this issue remains the same. Annoying the customer with unsolicited or irrelevant ads is the last thing these mobile marketers would do. The reason is pretty obvious. The customer has the choice to switch over to some other carrier if he doesn’t like the services of a carrier. Similarly, he also has the choice to opt out of the mobile advertising service any time he wants. So, it takes just one bad move from the mobile marketers’ side to push the customers too far. So, they would be very careful not to intrude into your private space – without your permission, at least. :)
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Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.
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