Inside Mobile Marketing

With the FCC hovering in the background, the U.S. Carriers are certainly doing their best to police their own off-deck mobile marketing/commerce programs as all of the major Carriers now utilize third party program audit firms. And while the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) continues to try and establish a set of cross-Carrier industry standards via their Consumer Best Practices guidelines, the major U.S. Carriers still have not adopted the guidelines as their de jure “LAWS’ as each major Carrier has issued addendum’s to the MMA’s guidelines. These addendums are essentially enforced by the audit firms each Carrier has contracted with.

As I’ve blogged about before, this is part of the reason why Mobile Marketing – at least from a program execution standpoint – is confusing and at times exasperating. Ensuring your mobile marketing program is compliant with the MMA guidelines, plus say 4-5 subtly different sets of Carrier rules is taxing on human (QA, account managers, engineers, etc.) and technical resources – especially when the individual Carriers make sudden, unexpected changes to their policies (as they have been known to do).

Quick note on the audit firms: program auditing is a niche industry that has recently grown to prominence within the U.S. Carrier-Aggregator-Marketer ecosystem. It is NOT a perfected science yet, as the audit teams have the tough task of educating their employees on the current set of “rules”, keeping up with ever-changing executions of 3rd-party programs and maintaining a fair and balanced interpretation of the many “grey” areas found within the many sets of policy guidelines we as an industry strive to adhere to.