The CTIA just released their report on wireless carrier audits for SMS marketing campaigns during the month of September 2013. We combed through the report for you and wanted to highlight some of the findings. Not sure what a CTIA audit is, find out more about these in our support center, or view the CTIA compliance handbook to help avoid receiving one for your very own SMS campaign.
The CTIA is reporting that in September 2013 there were 444 cases where advertising an SMS campaign resulted in a failed CTIA audit. This represented a 10.8% overall failure rate out of the 4,118 SMS campaigns the CTIA audited during September. You can see below what the CTIA audit failure rates for both standard rate and premium rate messaging are, and how many of the CTIA audit passes and failures were due to advertising as compared to message flow. You can click on the image to enlarge it.
In regard to the type of violations that caused these CTIA audit failures, the top three violations for September accounted for more than 50% of all violations. No mention in advertising that “message and data rates may apply” accounted for 19% of all CTIA violations, while no clear indication of a privacy policy or no link to a comprehensive T&C page accounted for 32% of all CTIA audit violations. You can see this in the nice pie chart below that the CTIA provided to us.
While no brand likes to go through a CTIA audit with their SMS marketing campaign, it can help to know what types of violations are triggering CTIA audits. As always, if you have any questions regarding CTIA compliance, audits, or any concerns you may have regarding your own campaign and recent TCPA changes, please contact your Tatango account manager.
