According to DM Bulletin*, Pocket Choice have launched a new website to help mobile users control inbound mobile marketing messages.

Putting users in control is all very laudable in this age of rising concern about mobile spam. So how does this actually work?

Users sign up to Pocket Choice, then Pocket Choice, goes and sells
that database to advertisers who want to send mobile marketing messages
to opted-in users. Apparently, users will be able to fine tune
permissions and preferences to ensure that only advertisers they want
to hear from get through. There’s no evidence of how they do this yet,
but let’s assume they will once they’ve got a little more established.

But we’ve been here before, I’m afraid. The Mobile Channel, for
example, started off in 2000 with much the same idea, apart from they
gave a reason why people should sign up - they paid people to receive
messages. This model doesn’t work either, but at least they tried to
think why someone would want to sign up to an unknown and untrusted
service in the first place.

The Mobile Channel gave up in the end and changed its business model to research via mobiles.

Pocket Choice, also can’t even specify who might be advertising with
them - in fairness, they have only just started - but it hardly builds
the trust that’s so important for this type of proposition. It also
demonstrates why this model is so hard to launch - no advertisers = no
users, no users = no advertisers.

I also know this model intimately myself, having been involved in a
very similar idea 5 years ago - ZagMe. ZagMe was a location-based
opt-in mobile marketing channel, that recruited 85,000 users, 150
advertisers and ran 1,500 campaigns for the likes of Burger King,
Reebok and The Body Shop. If you’d like a copy of my free, detailed
White Paper on the model and its lessons, send me an email using the
link on the top left of the blog.

While we did manage to make the model work (up to a point) it was
very expensive (¬£3.1 million/$5.4 million) and I don’t think we could
have scaled it easily outside the two malls we were operating in.
Furthermore, we had strong, funky branding and a more immediately
powerful user proposition than the Pocket Choice site, which is trying
to address too many audiences with the same channel.

So, unless there’s more to Pocket Choice than is immediately
apparent, my advice to them is - give up now fellas. Sorry to be so
blunt, but I do know this area rather too well. Others have tried and
failed and there’s nothing new here that indicates a different result. Invest your undoubted talents into something that hasn’t consistently failed as a business model.

By the way, what’s with the "Donate" button on the website? Why
would I, as a potential user, wish to give a donation to a company,
like Pocket Choice? Most odd.

Anyway, this downer doesn’t mean that there isn’t space for a trusted
filter for mobile users to employ to manage their mobile preferences.
What I’d like is a system that does this:

1. I divert all my messages to a trusted third party - let’s call it ZagMe, for old time’s sake.
2.
I go to the ZagMe web/wapsite and upload my mobile’s address book,
which authorises all my contacts to be allowed to pass straight through
the ZagMe filter.
3. I then set my preferences as to the kinds of
commercial offers I’d like to receive and complete basic profile info (especially
age and gender).
4. All commercial messages are automatically routed via ZagMe now and must pass my filter rules to get to me.
5.
ZagMe can also proactively approach advertisers to use the channel and
work with them to ensure best practice mobile marketing was applied.

Best practice mobile marketing is also covered in the White Paper by
the way. It might seem like common sense, but as I’ve written before,
common sense is normally a learned set of behaviours. If it was common
sense, why would professional digital marketers like MyOffers get things so wrong, as ex-ZagMe, Helen Keegan wrote about recently?

I appreciate that my ideal scenario has technical, as well as
commercial challenges - not the least is how you get users to sign up.
But the signing up issue is solved by common sense marketing, after all

*Image from DM Bulletin. Note to editor - you really should update
your photo library, unless you’re using this old Nokia in a
retro/ironic/amusing way, like me