Manchester festival marketers fined £70,000 over spam ‘mum’ texts Organisers of a Manchester music festival have been fined £70,000 after sending unsolicited marketing text messages. The digital junk was sent to 70,000 people who had bought tickets for the 2014 edition of Manchester's annual festival, the Parklife Weekender, and appeared on the recipients’ mobes to have been sent by "Mum …
Probably impossible to "overhaul" SMS in this respect. Remember it would still have to work with the millions of sold phones still out there.
Actually the facility to send a text with the sender name is important, people want to know who the text comes from rather than just a number. However this requires honesty, which is of course why the ICO has rules which forbid using false names.
Actually it is possible to fake a sender. Very nasty potential for abuse. Especially as any replies can go to the relevant entry in the phone's address book.
SMS is long overdue for a complete re-do but I don't know how likely that is.
On a related note: Bill Hick's on Marketing. I don't know if it's just confirmation bias, but I have found the field of marketing attracts some of the least pleasant types of people to be around that I've met. It's all the ones who are really full of themselves and think they're oh-so-cool, despite pretty much everyone outside of their niche group thinking they're arseholes. At least, that's an impression I have formed over the years.
I hadn't even heard about this festival till I read this, but then I'm pretty sure some of these promoters know exactly what they're doing and that this kind of story will generate buzz.
As fr SMS advertising, I recently called a local gym (I'm in California) using my mobile. Two minutes after ending the call, I got a text from them, inviting me to accept their promotional text messages. Creepy. At least they gave you the choice to stop them, which I did.
Any unsolicited text tends to severely annoy, and while SPAM email and even snail mail is bad enough, alerting me that it's arrived on my phone, and possibly using airtime to boot, is just deplorable, as are the snail jizz that perpetuate such tactics.
Perhaps Pandora and similar that send crap notifications to my phone could take heed.
The sent-from-Mum notion is nauseating, the repeated "your" almost as bad, the festival organizer's reaction to the uproar, even worse. Of all the soft jobs anyone can ever have -- aside from being a Lecturer in Media Studies, that is -- then being in "marketing" is it: I haven't encountered merely one moron in "marketing" in recent years but dozens, including one now hired on by a "university" to lecture in "Event Management". The illiterate self-regarding clown(s) responsible for Manchester festival marketing / event management crap should've been fined a further £70k for abuse of the English language and another £70k for intellectual assault. Actually, just stick another zero on that £70k and justice will have been done, or so my Mum (not you're Mum) tells me.
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