BT must be desperate to turn to Phorm

BT all but confirmed that they are going to implement the Phorm service across their 4 million users. Phorm has developed a service to deliver targeted advertising based on user browsing habits by using deep packet inspection (see comment).  Phorm claims that the targeting system is entirely anonymous and the Information Commissioner seems to agree although he has advised BT that users should only "opt-in".

However, there is some doubt on the part of industry experts that the sort of targeting planned by Phorm can ever be anonymous.  So why is BT involved in this dodgy area of activity?  Both Talk Talk and Virgin walked away from trialling Phorm when the level of resistance became clear on the part of users and industry commentators and pressure groups.  Well the answer maybe in BT's recently released financial numbers and the income that Phorm is suggesting BT can make from implementing the service despite the "opt-in".  However, Iain Livingston will face the prospect of BT yielding the ISP number one spot in the UK if they sacrifice the delivery of a quality service for some dodgy incremental income.  There are many more ways of making incremental income without upsetting your user base.  Sadly BT is increasingly run by accountants who neither understand the technology or customers' needs it would seem. (Isn't that similar to what happened to our Banks!)

BT should be very careful or their financial worries could multiply with the addition of Phorm.  This is just targeted spam and we do not want it.  BT should heed that old saying - "All that glisters isn't gold!"

Spam Phone Calls

As a marketeer I have always consider legitimate direct mail and phone canvassing as reasonable sales channels. However, I have now become so totally enraged with the endless number of spam telephone calls that I receive. The worst offenders appear to be Telephone companies who use Indian call centres to call me up to encourgage my adoption of say Toucan Telecom! They invariably introduce themselves as "Richard" or "Dave" when they are clearly Deepak or Sanjit and go on to tell me how much I could save if I change from BT to Toucan. The only problem is that their records are vastly out of date as I have been a customer of Sky for over a year.

The telephone sale is the scourge of modern life. I typically receive four calls each evening from Telcos sales, New Kitchens and Competitions for Timeshares. I have a similar number of "dead ender" calls which have nobody on the end of the call generator. I seldom let these callers get beyond their intro nowadays although my Partner is much more inclined to listen to them as she has no wish to be rude by slamming down the phone and feels sorry for the operators. Whilst I have some sympathy for the operators I have finally found a method which I hope will solve the problem. I have registered my telephone number with TPS (Telephone Preference Service) www.tpsonline.org.uk which aims to stop telephone marketing operations from abusing my telephone service.

I hope that this will help reduce the level of abuse. It will not stop those that come from the so called "competition operations". These I will report to OFCOM in the hope that they will take action, however, since I was the victim of BT's fraudulent downloading dialer scheme I doubt they will do anything! That is a story for another occassion! So if you are hacked off by repetitive marketing calls, start the fight back and use TPS!

You can also sign up to the Mail Preference Service on the TPS site and save a few trees from getting the chop!