Sometimes when people send me Guest Column ideas, or the finished article, I look at it and I think, “No, for our readership, that’s a little bit obvious. OK for a national newspaper perhaps, but the brand and agency types logging on to Mobile Marketing Magazine are pretty clued up about what the mobile channel is all about.”
At that point, I start hacking the article back, removing all the very obvious stuff, and leaving the more interesting or thought-provoking content intact.
And then you have a conversation that makes you wonder if you’re doing the right thing. A couple of days ago, I was talking to someone for an article about direct marketing for one of the other magazines I write for when I’m not doing this. This was the head of a direct and digital agency. I asked him whether mobile figured in any of his clients’ plans. His answer: “If I’m honest, no. Mobile does not feature. It’s something everyone talks about, 'We can do SMS', but there is a barrier there. People’s phones are people’s phones and you have to be really careful about how and when you use that for marketing purposes.”
Read that again. And then weep. This is not some Daily Mail reader. This is the head of a direct and digital agency, for whom the whole message about permission, opt in, respecting the consumer’s rights and privacy, seems to have got lost in transmission. It’s the sort of thing my friends say to me when I tell them I do this site. This idea that mobile marketing is all about spamming people on their phones. The very opposite, in fact, of what it is.
There’s a lot of good, top-down work being done by the likes of the MMA, the DMA and others, to educate brands and agencies as to the pros and cons of mobile as a marketing channel; how to do it, and how not to do it. If the conversation I had a couple of days ago is anything to go by, however, there’s plenty still to be done.

David Murphy
Editor