On a quite Saturday afternoon, one of the first days of the brand new 2016–2nd January, I glanced at my phone to see a WhatsApp message. When I opened it, this is what I saw.
The spam message was from a company called Capital-S. I was very annoyed for the following reasons:
- The most glaring one is that I never remember signing up for information from this company located in Singapore.
- I might not have been as annoyed if I indeed had needed a loan and Capital-S had somehow managed to figure it out (in a legal way of course) and had thought that they would reach out to me in a friendly way to try and help.
- Even if it wasn’t spam, it looks like one. It has the air that all spammy communication do. Like, what is ADV? It took me a minute to figure out it means ADVERTISEMENT. Why have they used this format <ADV>? Is it a secret alien code? Sure looks like one. Why put it there at all?
- Let’s assume that they hit the jackpot by spamming me and I want a loan. As any reasonable person would, I want to see the website first and type in CAPITAL-S.NET. What I get is a bad request error. If I google CAPITAL-S, nothing at all comes up. I could only access their website if I typed in www.capital-s.net Bad form and a big red flag.
5. The alien language comes up again — what is <UN>? Unsubscribe? If yes, then how? And then again unsub***. Am I missing something or, perhaps, if I type this in WhatsApp, the mother-ship will come to retrieve me?
6. WhatsApp has made it beautifully easy to mark such messages as spam by placing a giant button right below messages from unknown numbers. Hence spammers can be pretty sure they will get flagged, making this a very short term marketing strategy.
Marketers around the world have not yet hacked how to market on private messaging apps. And maybe we shouldn’t. At least definitely not like this. Adding a WhatsApp icon so that people can share your content/offer easily is a much better way to go.
