MMA explains away its latest research figures

Rating: I shouldn’t be saying this but …

It seems the European branch of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) was keen to meet the Press and explain away some of the weird results found in its second Annual Mobile Attitude and Usage study.

The report was compiled in association with researchers, Synovate. What European MMA md, Paul Berney, seemed to be saying was that some of the responses had dropped by half compared to 2007.

Reading between the lines this appeared to be down to the fact that the way most of the questions were phrased had been changed for 2008.

Nonetheless, most of the conclusions drawn from this year’s report were not unexpected. Such as that ‘text-to-win and interactive voting campaigns formed the most common mobile marketing activities in 2008.

What Mr Berney noted was that the Latin American and Asian Pacific territories showed a significantly higher interest in willingness to participate in mobile marketing.

This is almost certainly a reflection of the fact that, in most of those countries, mobile is the dominant form of communication because fixed lines are relatively rare.

There was a quite lively discussion as to what exactly construed a mobile marketing campaign when one of the panel admitted that sending a text message back to Transport for London actually counted. Isn’t that a necessity rather than a participation?

I personally asked the panel whether they thought that problems with prepaid users authenticating themselves as over 18 was holding mobile campaigns back.

The answer seemed to be a resounding ‘No’ given that “operators have taken a very aggressive approach given previous problems,” according to Alex Meisi from Sponge.

I’d beg to differ. The credit crunch is causing many former contract customers over to prepaid. And in most cases the only way to prove you’re over 18 is to make a token credit card payment.

But there’s a credit crunch and people are cutting up their credit cards. Meisi suggested that only a small number of people are involved but I’m not so sure.

The report goes on sale to non-memberson December 1st and don’t look for details of it on the MMA web site quite yet because a redesign has caused some pages to go missing!

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