We think it’s better for agencies to play together, but China’s recent text spam situation is a little much. Beijing has vowed to outlaw mobile phone spam messages after seven advertising companies including
Focus Media were discovered to have sent commercial messages to almost half of China’s population of cell phone users… without their consent. Totes stoops, totally.
Focus Media Holding possessed personal information pertaining to more than 200 million Chinese cell phone users, accounting for nearly half of the country’s 555 million mobile phone subscribers. The Chinese public wasn’t having it after the junk mail messages burst onto their mobiles, but you know, regulation to protect privacy isn’t in place in China, so considering that text messages have been the key income generator for China Mobile, who processed the messages along with China Unicom, they were free to do as they liked. Get more of the story here.
Can you imagine if that happened Stateside? Hmm… actually, we’re guessing it wouldn’t be a big deal, at first. Consumers would totally shrug it off and be like – “junk texts? What’s next?” Seriously. Look how long it took folks to rally against telephone solicitors. Although, we’re also willing to bet that agencies wouldn’t dare make such a play. In this arena, common sense and fear of the great unknown, mobile advertising, would keep them in check for sure.