Am I in a rotten mood tonight? I seem to have inadvertently bookmarked a few news stories that get me spitting on the inside...

Helen is being far too kind if you ask me: "The claim impressive results (well if you're in Direct Marketing or Sales Promotion they are). 9,595 active Bluetooth devices were detected and sent messages. Of these, 703 people accepted the offer of the video download – an average of 87 people each day. Seems good on the face of it."

I've seen some quite frankly ridiculous numbers being quoted by providers of Bluetooth marketing recently. One of them claimed take-up in the 80-90% range; the mismatch between this, and the experiences of everyone I've actually met, is quite shocking.

Even in the case of Square Group's 9%, I'm unconvinced. How many of those people actually downloaded the full video (as opposed to "accepting the offer of a video download")? How many knew what they were doing? For how many did the video play properly and look half-decent? How many people had a poor experience; if 9% were chuffed and 70% really pissed off, then I doubt you could consider this campaign a success? And surely if you're going to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in any worthwhile manner, you should be collecting this sort of data?

This stuff is balls, it's the mobile equivalent of paying a man to stand in the street shouting at passers-by in a strong accent few of them can hope to understand, then putting out a press release claiming that 10% of them heard you. And a kick in the eye goes to the next person to justify it to me because it's "better than direct mail".

I'm sure there is potential in Bluetooth for interesting marketing applications, which make appropriate use of the technology and treat consumers in a respectful and ethical manner. But this nothing but spamming, even if you buy the IMHO shady legal-on-a-technicality argument.

/me takes deep breaths.