Spam potentially threatens future of mobile marketing

Spam could potentially stop the SMS market before it has fully taken off if nuisance texts take hold of the platform, an expert has warned.

According to Alistair Hill, analyst at M:Metrics, around 12 per cent of people in Europe are receiving spam in any given month - a situation that could have grave consequences for the burgeoning marketing medium.

He also pointed out that there has been a 25 per cent year-on-year growth of spam across Europe and the trend is “moving upwards which is potentially an issue for a number of different reasons”.

“One is that lots of companies and advertisers are looking to use SMS as a way to communicate with their target audience,” Mr Hill commented.

He added: “The issue comes to what happened with email spam - basically it just stuffed up the whole industry and then email wasn’t a very nice way of communicating with people.”

According to statistics released by Airwide Solutions, 5.6 million people in the EU access financial information from their mobile phones - a 23.6 per cent jump from the same time last year.