If you’re going to make a big deal about delivering ads only to those people who have opted to receive them, then you better make sure that is what is happening.
On Friday last week, O2 Media released the news that L’Oreal and Starbucks were using the location technology of Placecast, allied to O2’s customer opt-in service O2 More.
The release itself would leave you in little doubt about how O2 saw the service. Here’s some selected quotes that highlight that this service is a) opt-in and b)targeted and personal:
“enabling brands to deliver relevant SMS and MMS to consumers in a more targeted, engaging and effective way than ever before“
“the six-month trial, which relies on consumers opting into the service to receive relevant messages dependent on their age, gender, interests and for the first time, their location“
“It enables brands to target their audiences better than ever before and give consumers relevant and targeted information and offers.”
“When opted-in O2 More customers are found to be within a geo-fenced area owned by Starbucks, those interested in food and drink receive an SMS offering them money off Starbucks VIA Ready Brew at a nearby branch”
“O2 does not spam its customers with irrelevant or frequent SMS or MMS”
There’s enough there I think, to make the point. The service is opt-in, targeted and relevant.
So how is it then that a colleague who has never opted in to O2 More received an MMS from Starbucks offering him 50% off Starbucks VIA products – the exact offer O2 Offers is making in this trial. And when I Tweeted this had happened, one follower got back to say he’d had the same thing. Neither user had, to the best of their knowledge, ever signed up to O2 More, or ticked anything relating to it. One of them doesn’t even like coffee (I’ve since unfollowed him, obviously, for that sin).
So, then, I called O2’s press office to ask if it was aware of other instances, and whether they could look into the matter.
O2 said it knew of no other problems at that point, and would look into it. So far, though, no news. It’s possible that the users did sign up somehow without knowing it – but that seems unlikely that both managed to do so. It also seems unlikely that I have stumbled upon the only two people in the whole of O2’s customer base to have received messages that they shouldn’t have. Advice from @O2 on Twitter was to text STOP, etc. But the point is, this was supposed to be an opt-in, targeted service. It was also sold to the brands as that, I’m guessing.
Now, I’m not writing this just for the sake of bashing O2. I want to see operators succeed in such services, and think there’s a great case to be made for them to do so. But this kind of thing can be (can be, I stress, it’s not nailed on) damaging. It annoys users and might make them think twice about trusting their operator with their data. And if it gets back to the brands that O2 has indeed, albeit unwittingly, spamming users, then that’s not good either.
I don’t want to make a huge deal of what might just be isolated incidents. And I appreciate there are worse things than being offered a half price coffee from Starbucks (like, being offered a free one, as the old joke goes). I just think it’s incumbent on operators to get this sort of thing right from the off, because consumer iD and data is going to be so critical to future business models for all of us in this industry.
Now I’m off for a coffee. Because I’m worth it.