Even if you didn’t buy anything this Singles' Day shopping spree, chances are you still had a ton of advertisements sent right to your pocket.
In the days leading up to China’s largest consumer event, which falls on November 11 every year, advertisers and mobile marketers upped their game and bombarded potential customers with unsolicited promotional text messages, wrote a commentator writing for The Paper, a Chinese news website.
Retailers pay very little to SMS marketing in China, said the author. For approximately 285 yuan (US$41), you can send 50,000 messages to the phones of potential customers. “Some said they received messages from stores they had never done business with and about products they had never even asked the sellers about,” said the commentator.
Singles' Day was started by e-commerce giant Alibaba and has since grown into a multi-billion dollar retail bonanza where consumers snatch up discount goods from smartphones to toilet paper over a 24-hour spending binge. This past Monday marked the 11th year of the event.
While the nation participates in this shopping frenzy, individuals “still have the right to not want to see or hear anything about it,” said the commentator.
When things get carried away, it's not just annoying. It can get illegal. China’s Advertisement Law bans any intrusive form of marketing unless the recipient choose to receive it. The ban covers everything from slipping a pamphlet under your door or in your car window to sending digital messages to your devices.
Clearly, the law isn’t the deterrent it’s supposed to be and spam messages are ruining Singles' Day for us all, the author wrote.
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