Your sell phone calling

Mobile phone users are being bombarded with calls from advertisers, much to their annoyance, reports Barry McIntyre from Hong Kong.

After suffering years of having their buttons pushed, mobile phones are turning the tables and attempting to push a few buttons of their own.

Blazing a technological trail which is likely to be imitated across the world, network providers in Hong Kong are throwing open their airwaves to advertisers.

"Dear subscriber, ever thought of visiting the Forbidden City?"

But so far the scheme appears to have had a lukewarm reception, raising mobile users' hackles instead of shifting goods and services.

"My phone rings three or four times a day, and it's just a recorded message trying to sell me something I'm not interested in," says Arlene Chen, a property agent working among the high rises in Hong Kong's densely-populated Mid Levels.

"I don't even know what they're selling. As soon as I hear it's a sales message, I just switch it off. Too many other people need to call me," she says.

Hang up

Ms Chen consented to receiving advertisements as part of a package which offered cheaper calls and free airtime. "I would cancel my phone contract, but at the moment it is not convenient."

As soon as I hear it's a sales message, I just switch it off

Arlene Chen

Ms Chen, whose diminutive Nokia only seems to stop ringing when she's talking into it, is among many reluctant users who have given the latest breakthrough in cold-calling a distinctly frosty reception.

Unsurprisingly, phone companies are now modifying their sales pitch.

Telecom firm Sunday, one of the operators which is developing mobile spam, is now working on a system which detects where phone users are and sends them advertisements relating to shops or facilities nearby.

Softer cell

User profiles could also ensure that adverts would be targeted to the interests or needs of the recipient.

More than 10% of SingTel Mobile's users have registered for a plan which offers them two minutes of free airtime if they listen, or blithely ignore, 20 seconds of advertising before their call is connected.

As Timo Kamarainen reported for dot.life from Helsinki in December, the idea is by no means exclusive to Hong Kong. (See Living life by txt msg, on the right.) Some mobile subscribers in the UK too have long listened to their answer phones filling up with adverts from their phone company.

The US is currently drafting legislation which may see this nascent mass marketing concept banned completely.

But Hong Kong is a long-established testing ground where the latest developments in cellphone technology sink or swim.

Mobiles dominate the territory. With Hong Kong's underground Mass Transit Railway and even the sleepier outlying islands all wired for sound, there's no escape from chirruping rings and half-heard conversations.

Celler's market

Even in Shek-O, a quiet beach community on the south of Hong Kong Island, thirsty mobile owners can use their phones to buy Coke from a massive vending machine which dominates the village's bus station.

They simply dial up the machine and the cost of a can is added to their phone bill.

With noise from every quarter, advertisers want to get straight to people's ears

That advertising has jumped on to the mobile bandwagon is no shock either. Advertisers in Hong Kong are falling over themselves to attract the attention of an increasingly bored market, often commandeering technology with dubious logic.

Huge sums of cash have been spent to broadcast 30-second commercials on to the walls of underground stations and kit buses out with flatscreen TV sets which play endlessly-looped commercials to snoozing commuters as they trawl into work from outlying territories.

But with the technology already in place to blitz mobile users with silver-tongued sales patter, pushing everything from horse racing tips to hardware, advertisers are unlikely to have any hang-ups about this new opportunity.

Unless you count the phone users hanging up that is.