WAA Draws Up Guidelines To Regulate SMS Advertising

As UK mobile phone owners are beginning to receive SMS adverts for the first time (see Text Message Advertising System Hopes To Target Consumers On The Move), the Wireless Advertising Association (WAA) have unveiled creative standards and measurement definitions to regulate wireless ads.

The organisation’s vice chairman Don Albert said: “It is critical that everyone in the industry rally round a common language that describes the delivery and measurement of ads, particularly since the stakeholders in the wireless marketing arena are so diverse.”

In attempts to establish a common language for the wireless industry the WAA have defined an SMS advert as, ‘an ad type that consists of the full 160 characters available in SMS’, while ‘sponsorship’ is described as 34 characters used to summarise the content of the ad that it precedes.

A number of key terms aimed at ensuring the accurate measurement of the delivery and impact of SMS advertising were also clarified under the new WWA standards.

Basic definitions include:

• Permission Level: The level of permission a user has granted to a specific carrier or service to receive advertising messages from them.
• Potential Audience: The total number of unique users that is reached by any site’s advertisement, or the number of addressable devices a service provider has the permission and ability to advertise to.

Terms relating to the delivery of SMS ads are:

• Reach: The number of devices to which an advertiser’s message is delivered.
• Frequency: The number of times an advertising message has been sent to a user.
• Impression: The sending of an advertiser’s message to a user as recorded by the server software.

Terms used in the measurement of ad campaign delivery include:

• Click through: User interaction with an advertisement that does not initiate a call back.
• Message received: Confirmation forwarded back to a carrier or SMS server that states a message has been successfully transmitted.
• Call Back: User calling in to a pre-defined telephone number communicated in a wireless advertisement for more information.

The WAA will release more standards and definitions in the coming months, including creative standards for ads on PDA’s, WAP, I Mode, SMS and pagers.

The WAA is a global organisation comprised of companies from across the wireless arena including UK owned 24/7 Media.

WAA: www.waaglobal.org

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