Meet the man who has 1.3m mobile numbers

If you have ever received a promotional text message on your mobile phone, the chances are that Ajaz Bhat had something to do with it. Few in the UAE are better at capitalising on the possibilities of mobile marketing than Mr Bhat, a partner in a low-profile company called UAE Mobiles. "We have more than 1.3 million mobile numbers," Mr Bhat says proudly as he delivers a rapid-fire sales pitch on the company's ability to bring a message to the public. "Soon, everything will be done on the mobile phone, we all know this. So the advertising potential can only get bigger, and we are the best at this in the UAE."

But one company's gold mine is another's person's spam nightmare, as Eman al Natour can testify. When she set up her mobile phone account with Etisalat, she was not expecting to open a new channel to the flood of advertising that we swim through in everyday life. But that is what Mrs Natour, a learning and educational adviser at the oil company Zadco in Abu Dhabi, received: a new source of at least five unsolicited advertisements each day, coming via text message.

"The messages are very annoying," she said. "I get them at any time of day or night. I have five children and a demanding job; the last thing I want to do at the end of a busy day is to sit there and delete unwanted text messages." Millions of phone users in the UAE are likely to sympathise with Mrs Natour because they, too, receive promotional text messages daily. Their numbers, along with at least two million others, are in the hands of a number of local and international companies that will send mass promotional text messages for as little as 10 fils per number.

Mobile marketing is a big business, yet remains in its infancy. It is already estimated to be worth more than US$3 billion (Dh11bn) globally, and should become a $25bn industry within five years according to ABI Research, an advisory firm. Its lure is clear. The mobile phone is now a part of everyday life for everyone from lorry drivers to chief executives. In the UAE, there are almost two mobile subscriber lines for every person in the country, a ratio that continues to grow. Whenever a new media and communication platform becomes such a common part of life, marketers will naturally begin to lick their lips.

Advertising by SMS has a lure above and beyond its pervasiveness, at least for the time being. The industry remains underdeveloped, with standards yet to emerge and users still fresh. This means people are more likely to read and respond to text advertisements, compared with similar advertisements in print or online. A high response rate, which means more people reacting to a promotional message with the desired action, is the pinnacle of direct marketing.

It is not uncommon for SMS advertising campaigns to get response rates of 25 per cent, an unthinkable figure in other media. Less than five per cent of users click on most Google search advertisements, according to the company's own figures. Traditional telemarketing campaigns - which rely on costly human marketers making time consuming phone calls - have an average response rate of five per cent, according to the Direct Marketing Association, based in the US.

"I read every text message I get" said Eman Fawzy, an event planner in Dubai. "I think that is why the companies want to use texts, because they know we will read them." Immersed in advertising since childhood, most people know how to filter out the noise in their environment, looking away from the television during commercial breaks and skimming past adverts in magazines and websites. But the mobile phone is seen as a more personal device, and text messages still carry an elevated assumption of intimacy. This explains both the effectiveness of mobile advertising and the raised consumer emotions that it incites.

"I get five or six of these messages a day from all sorts of different organisations," said Lucy Taylor, an English-language teacher in Dubai. "It is really annoying, especially when they come in the middle of the night and wake me up. I have to get up really early to tackle the Dubai traffic and get to work, so if a text disturbs my sleep then I get really wound up. I really want them to stop." But as long as text marketing remains a cheap, effective option, Mrs Taylor is unlikely to get her wish. A company wanting to promote its product through text message would be looking at a charge of 12 to 14 fils per message, Mr Bhat says. "All of our customers will say the response to the messages is very good, it is the most effective way of doing things."

Mr Bhat acknowledges that many people are unhappy with receiving unsolicited messages and said his company would remove any number from its database if requested. "They can just reply to the message and ask to be taken off," Mr Bhat says. "But not many do." UAE Mobiles develops a number of products targeting mobile owners such as mobile games, applications, wallpapers and ring tones. In many cases, it is through people downloading these products that the company builds its list of mobile numbers.

Both Etisalat and du say they will never divulge personal information, including mobile numbers, to a third party firm without explicit permission from the customer. Such a practice would violate at least two Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) policies governing how customer information must be managed. Further along the Gulf Coast, in Qatar, the country's national telecommunications company said last month that unsolicited promotional text messages represented a growing concern for Middle Eastern mobile users.

"Qtel is deploying every professional and technological resource it can to try to limit this spam menace within Qatar," a company spokesman said. According to the TRA's policy on privacy, sharing customer details with a third party without consent can take place only "if such information is requested by an authorised official of a competent authority, in the interest of public or national security." The policy is backed by federal law from a 2003 decree.

But Mr Bhat, who moved to the UAE from Australia three years ago, has a salesman's instinct and is quick to spot an opportunity. As our conversation finished, we gave the standard pleasantries and I prepared to hang up the phone. "One last thing," he said. "Can I have your mobile number?" * With additional reporting by Anna Seaman tgara@thenational.ae