14 DAY TRIAL // While the American Idol TV show tops the charts in the United States, a spam campaign AT&T’s cellphone customers have received is subject to controversy this week. The carrier, which is American Idol’s telecom sponsor, is reported to have sent a significant number of adverts to its mobile users.
According to Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T Wireless, the company wanted “people to watch the show and participate. It makes perfect sense to use texting to tell people about a show built on texting.” The operator's subscribers have not seen this with good eyes, and complained on certain forums about what they've considered to be spam.
What we can understand from the company's statement is that this would be only a simple advertising campaign on the TV show. The only thing that AT&T's spokesman hasn't unveiled is the fact that only the company's customers are able to vote by text message in the American edition of the show. Undoubtedly, the financial interest the carrier has in boosting viewers’ participation in the show is a high one.
As many of you might already know, the spam on mobile phones is a common thing, although not as spread as the email spam. Last year, several reports on cellphone spam have been published, and one of them pointed to an impressive statistic of over 353 billion spam messages being sent in China every year.
AT&T is able to argue that its move has been covered by law, as it has given subscribers a way of opting out of further messages. On the other hand, the company's move has made a lot of its users quite angry, a state of affairs that cannot be changed too easily. At the same time, the campaign might not have been a very good thing for the TV show either.