• by Mark Naples , April 15, 2005

When I was a boy, my grandmother would frantically cry, "Telephone!" whenever the phone rang in our house. We had a large family, so this little drama took place multiple times every day.

I didn't understand why the mere ringing of the phone was such an important thing to grandma until one day, when my mom reminded me that grandma was born in the 19th century. Of course, this put it in perspective. When grandma was growing up, a phone call was a big deal - something important. If she had been born in an age where phone calls were commonplace, as I was, then she wouldn't have regarded them as so important.

Such a simple perspective shift can be edifying when applied to other milieu. In 1996, America Online suffered a major service outage that lasted a whole day. The anger and controversy that it provoked was loud and sustained. Even after AOL restored their service, the stock was way down and confidence had suffered, both among users and employees.

Some analysts wrote, "I told you so," and criticized the company for faulty service, technology, or both. Others, however, recognized that the enormous outcry that the stoppage had caused indicated how vital AOL's service, especially e-mail, had become to its millions of subscribers. Anyone who bought AOL stock that summer, in 1996, saw their investment grow on the surge that followed, and the splits that followed thereafter.

I think about that AOL case study sometimes when I discuss e-mail marketing and spam legislation, if only because I think some marketers have failed to recognize how important our new communications channels are to consumers. E-mail is still a relatively "new" technology to anyone born before 1978 or so. It's not as new as the telephone was to someone like my grandma, but if you weren't using e-mail as a young student, you probably get more peeved about spam than someone who did. That's just how perspectives on these matters are formed. It's one factor to consider, anyway.

Last week, Omnicom Group's BBDO Worldwide released the findings of a survey conducted by their direct marketing unit, Proximity Worldwide. The survey found that 14 percent of the world's mobile phone users report that - at some point in time - they interrupted a sex act to answer a ringing mobile phone. About 3,000 respondents participated in this survey, so it represents a statistically significant survey sample.

The highest percentage of, um, mobile phone-induced interruptus was found in Germany and Spain, where more than one in five users reported that they had interrupted sex to answer their cell phones; the lowest ratio reported came from Italy, where only 7 percent reported doing so. This lower number amused me, since no self-respecting Italian male would ever admit to having picked up a ringing cell phone while flagrante delecto with his lover. It sort of goes along with expectations, doesn't it? (Hope nobody's offended - after all, I'm Italian)

According to a BBDO spokesman, the purpose of the study was to "better understand how consumers interact with their phones." Let's hope that the kind of importance consumers place on their phones, talking loudly on trains, obnoxiously letting them ring in restaurants or church, picking them up during sex, doesn't lead marketers to overwhelm cell phone users with direct response calls. Most cell phone users I encounter already remind me of my grandmother, in terms of the importance they place on their own calls. How often does it seem that the person next to you on the train is bent on making every call - no matter how inane - into a conversational event that everyone around them has to endure?

I'm afraid that marketers will exploit the importance that Americans and others place on their cell phones. After all, the reasoning goes, if 15 percent of cell phone users say they practice cell phone interruptus, how few will mind hearing a marketing message on the other end of the terribly important call they just answered?