Hooper, S. (2004). Mobile Phones Face 'Spam Epidemic'. CNN, February 19, 2004.

A new global survey, conducted by British mobile data technology company Empower Interactive, reveals the second tide of "spam" has now spread to cell phone networks. Quite similar with its twin "junk mail", cell phone spam aims at vulnerable users and annoys them with unsolicited text, what's more, "missed call" messages.

Phone spam also brings about a new marketing strategy (or we may say, scam) named "missed call marketing". According to this week's UK Guardian newspaper, "computer-generated calls ring just once to leave a 'missed call' message on a phone user's handset. If they then returned the call they were transferred to a premium rate number, offering a cash prize but more regularly leaving victims with a hefty charge on their phone bill."

The development of science and technology causes some unexpected problems in terms of ethics and legislations. As Johannesen states in the beginning Chapter 10 (p. 181), controversies on the Internet illustrates pressures for legalistic approaches to ethics and for the formation of formal codes of ethics. Nevertheless, it is a pity that I failed to find any revision either for the American Association of Advertising Agencies code of ethics or The Advertising Principles of American Business. It's noticeable that the two codes were adopted in 1990 and 1984 respectively, when the Internet hasn't reached its golden time nowadays.

Customers of Information Age are more vulnerable and passive compared with their predecessors due to the growing omnipotence and ubiquity of modern advertising. In old days, people still possessed the rights to 'receive or not" when confronted with advertisements. Nowadays, their options have been eliminated to "delete or not". Having read through the codes of ethics adopted by the two organizations, I find that what the codes intent to protect is not actually the rights of customers, though it seems so. If you go deep into the lines to examine the hidden words, it is evident that the real purpose is to set the rule for the game and make it a "fair play" of advertising agencies and, more importantly, the companies who write checks to advertising agencies.

I personally doubt about the advertising effects of those spam, no matter on Internet or cell phone. Will people buy the stuff whose producer bombed their cell phones with junk information? It is quite possible that people even don't read the junk messages before deleting them. So, what causes those companies take the risk of irritating their potential customers to employ the underhand means to promote their product sales? It could be the cost. Spam might be the cheapest advertising method. The price for a collection of 1 million email addresses is only a few dollars. A large portion of spam is from those small companies. Unlike those reputable big companies who spend billions of dollars on advertising "wisely and ethically", those small companies have to worry about how to make more people know about their products. But the problem is, the more people they want to reach by cheap spam, the quicker they get kicked out of the game. Who will benefit from this? It is not hard to tell.