Some of you may remember a trivia competition that was advertised on television earlier this year which invited people to text in answers to multiple choice questions. The campaign quickly ran afoul of the Commerce Commission after it received complaints from viewers who’d taken part and unwittingly found they were continually receiving texts they were being charged for via their telephone account.
Following adverse publicity TV Cab, the watchdog agency for television advertising, refused to run any similar campaigns. And as commercials are the oxygen for many text services the industry’s been keen to find a solution to the issue ever since. In a mobile market of over 100% penetration, content is the growth area and text campaigns such as the trivia competition are at sharp end of this fledgling market.
In a text service there are a number of players in the chain clipping their ticket but the key ones are the Carriers and the Content Service Providers (the operators that set up the deals and run the applications that enable the campaigns). So it has become the job of the Telecommunications Carriers Forum (TCF) to produce a voluntary Code of Practice around Mobile Premium SMS Services, which will appease the Commission and organisations such as TV Cab.
On the working party formed to draft the Code were content service providers Run the Red, Sybase and Mobile Messenger, carriers Vodafone, Telecom and NZ Communications and TUANZ.
What took the Australian industry two years to write, only took us two months, but our efficiency is largely due to the fact that we didn’t start with a blank sheet of paper. We had a cut-and-paste draft from both the Australian and UK codes to work from.
The New Zealand Code that’s just been released for public consultation sets out a number of requirements which are designed to protect customers from running up huge unsecured bills on their telephone accounts. For example, every time a customer spends $30 they get sent a text reminding them of this fact (the $30 amount came about because in the UK its £30 and in Australia its $30).
However, one outstanding issue is that if a customer wants to cease their participation in a subscriber service they can only text the word ‘STOP’, and it’s unclear that if they send the words ‘No’, ‘Don’t Want’, ‘**** Off’, they’ll get an error message back. Over time consumers will need to be educated to know that STOP is the only text that means stop.
You can check out the draft code at the TCF website. Public consultation ends on November 19.