Compliance is King

Last week, this court ruling reminded me of a great decision Waterfall Mobile made in its early days.

It was February 24, 2006. Waterfall’s product team was sitting in our just-built conference room discussing consumer privacy. The conversation hinged on this critical point: that the mobile phone is one of the most personal effects a person has. As a point of ethics we knew we needed to respect that fact, so we unanimously decided to do whatever we could to build a product with built-in privacy protections.

Back then mobile companies were popping up left and right – and many of them weren’t bothering to follow the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)’s strict campaign guidelines (pdf). Also at around that time, Waterfall had received some suspect requests from would-be clients.

After getting a few of these fishy new business opportunities, we opted to form a compliance team, one that still exists to this day. At least one member of each department (Product, Client Services, Sales & Engineering) sits on the committee.

Waterfall’s compliance committee reviews all major campaigns and collateral, approving all the items on this checklist:

  • Message content
  • Number of messages sent to the consumer
  • Carrier-mandated language in the messages (i.e. “Standard message rates apply”)
  • Terms
  • Unsubscribe options
  • Support and help information clearly displayed on all call-to-action materials and collaterals

In addition, we’ve created a very strict list upload policy, which ensures that the client has obtained its list of user numbers legally, and takes responsibility for same.

The result of all this? In a handful of cases, the committee has made decisions that resulted in Waterfall asking the client to take their business elsewhere. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but I wouldn’t have it any other way – because Waterfall has built a hard-earned reputation as a company that follows the rules.

The MMA, CTIA, mobile carriers and aggregators have made excellent progress coming together with simple and unified campaign regulations, and now take the step of routinely auditing active campaigns. These auditors check the message flow and the marketing collateral, and both are scored.

It’s always a pleasure when Waterfall receives an audit from a carrier or our aggregators. Why? Because most of the time we get perfect scores.

It is my distinct honor to send these high scores along to the rest of the Waterfall team, and a personal source of pride for me – because I know we’re doing our part to maintain the integrity of the mobile ecosystem.

I’m glad we made the right call on February 24, 2006.