News & Analysis

An Overdose of Personalized Ads – Google Comes to the Rescue

The Internet giant has take their rich messaging feature off the business accounts in India following customer complaints of spamming

Over the past few months enterprises have been using (or should we say over-using) the rich communication service (RCS) options to deliver customized ads to users, often leading to a collective representation of angst on social media. Now, Google has taken heed of complaints and announced that it was disabling the feature in India for enterprises. 

The company issued a statement which said, “We are aware that some businesses are abusing our anti-spam policies to send promotional messages to users in India. We are disabling this feature in India while we work with the industry to improve the experience for users.” Just another instance of over-enthusiastic marketing folks bombarding prospective customers! 

Before moving ahead, here’s a brief on what exactly RCS is. In the days of SMS and MMS, users had limited customization options and businesses used to merely carpet-bomb their messages across as large a territory as they could afford. However, with the arrival of WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and others, enterprises are already spoilt for choice. 

RCS, which hit the market in 2007, has been evolving beyond the traditional text messaging. They contain a set of features that get rolled into a protocol and can be used on any smartphone that wants to support it. At the basic level, it extends character limits and image qualities on the messages. 

However, it also has the ability to enable sharing of videos, GIFs and snippets of data such as location. It uses internet data to transmit content that can be encrypted with standards that are perfectly capable of blocking off spam. Both iMessage and WhatsApp are prime examples of what RCS is capable of. 

Coming back to the latest controversy, Google has confirmed that businesses using RCS to deliver ads were violating the company’s policies on privacy. In fact, their decision to disable RCS Business Messaging in India is unprecedented, but we do not have to go far to ascertain the reasons for this. 

The service has never been stalled in another other geography, but nor have businesses fallen over each other in these countries trying to grab customer attention through unsolicited ads. This should be a lesson to marketing pundits that too much of everything is bad and could often result in the medium itself being removed. 

That Google came out effectively and strongly is a lesson for marketers in other countries. But, it still remains to be seen how the company plans to combat unsolicited marketing as its decision to disable business messaging can, at best, be a temporary solution. Maybe, it’s time for Google to bring in default settings on its Android app that enhances spam detection. 

 

 

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