Holly buys A2P SMS for her clients, brands, she’s a Campaign Service Provider. She’s likely the largest individual brand aggregator in the market. This gives Holly unmatched insight on the challenges and needs of brands.

Holly refers the to SMS ecosystem as ancient, which is in some ways unfortunately true. Yet its continued success is made possible from the innovations and people working on top of that ancient infrastructure.

There is a blame game taking place, blaming one category of traffic or another. Affiliate marketing gets much of the blame for spam. Affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products.

Holly highlights we must make a distinction between scams versus spam. Both are a problem, affiliate marketing is most definitely NOT responsible for scams. On spam, there are clear consent guidelines which are getting stricter. Most affiliate marketing meet those rules, as without meeting them, they are out of business. Holly sees the reports on here traffic, its clean.

Johnny brings up an important point that the lawyers are part of the problem in the ecosystem. They stop open discussion in the industry on spam. The regulators’ lawyers want to sue companies, and the carriers’ lawyers stop open discussion. Wadaro stops SIM boxes, a growing problem (again), they provide their data to carriers, and that data disappears with no feedback on its effectiveness. Just repeat orders.

Holly bring the discussion back to here four key points (some of which Matthew Smith also brought up in his Industry 4.0 presentation.)

• Box ticking – an industry body creates a list of checks, that are not about the customers’ needs, rather defending their position in legacy accounts.
• Secret Society handshakes. I refer to it as an old boys network. Where organizations like the MEF tell their members to ignore my work, and they do, to the detriment of their customers.
• Importance of guidance and collaboration.
• Scams versus spam

Holly summarize her role in the ecosystem as managing A2P routes and Brand accounts. As the brands are not part of the secret society with ever changing rules, regulations, and entities run by the members of the secret society.

A simple point on A2P SMS is there will never be no complaints, it’s a fact of life, it’s the percentage of complaints that matter. Holly is confident she can send one million loan messages following the CTIA guidelines and have fewer complaints that Disney. The current situation is almost every hop in the chain MNOs, TCR, DCA, CSP are imposing requirements on the traffic.

Holly had good words to say about Infobip, she does not use Twilio or Syniverse. The point Holly makes is let everyone use their brain, do their job, and truly know your customer. Which Holly does in marketing. This reminded me of a phase Commio when through after it bought an SMS company of ‘firing customers’, as it got to know those customers. This resulted in their traffic cleanliness improving greatly.

Aetna (healthcare), Geico (insurance), many banks do not do their own marketing, they use someone else, affiliate marketing. SMS is just one of many channels, and it’s become much more difficult to use. Which moves dollars to the other channels.

I really feel this comment from Holly, “if you give people the rules, they will follow the rules.” Because their business depends on it. But currently its an ambiguous ever changing pool. This has driven the rapid growth in SIM farms and foreign scammers.

Holly began in personal loans for tribal lending. She did one campaign with 169 million messages, received 10 complaints, was cut off, and those complaints were not for her messages. Upon reviewing the content, the messaging company shut her off as the campaign was loans. This is an example of how SMS limits its market. Set rules, tick boxes, assume you know better than your cusrtomers.

At about 14 minutes on the video, Holly provides a funny review of the problems brands face in working with the different members of the SMS ecosystem. Customer focus is definitely not a strength. She does this to drive home the lack of cooperation in working together to provide value to consumers. And the importance of clearly set and followed rules, like CAN-SPAM.

Johnny makes a critical point, the large CPaaS companies want the CSP’s customers, its squeezing them out of business on purpose. Hence the difficulty many CSPs have faced this year. One company based in the UK gave up building its US presence, it became too time consuming / expensive. The market is consolidating, removing SMB which are the heart of innovation.

Matthew (previous speaker) joins the conversation, highlighting how much better email spam controls are these days as a loose consortium came together through the IETF. While the SMS cartel continues to struggle. Which backs up Holly’s point on collaboration not blaming, and difficult diversity or rules rather than a clear directive like CAN-SPAM.

I also included Holly’s comments in RJ Burnham’s AI session, as I found them insightful, and you have all Holy’s contributions in one place.

Just restating Holly’s 4 points:

• Box ticking – an industry body creates a list of checks, that are not about the customers’ needs, rather defending their position in legacy accounts.
• Secret Society handshakes. I refer to it as an old boys network. Where organizations like the MEF tell their members to ignore my work, and they do.
• Importance of guidance and collaboration.
• Scams versus spam