Social usage The information communicated by a missed call is pre-agreed and contextual in nature. MCM campaigns take advantage of how cellular providers may offer unlimited incoming calls and
text messages: advertisements contain an
instruction for customers to place a missed call at a specific number. MCM was a prominent practice in India, where it appealed to the country's cultural and economic environment: in the early-2010s, at least 90% of all cellular phone users in India were on prepaid services,
feature phones were still commonplace, A number of companies specialised in MCM, including Flashcall, Tested during the
2010 FIFA World Cup, Zipdial was popularized by missed call services for
cricket scores and
Anna Hazare's
anti-corruption movement; after serving over 415 million calls in its first three years of operation, the company was acquired by
Twitter in 2015 for a value reported to be between
US$20 and 40 million. In 2014, the
social networking service Facebook announced that it would support links to missed call numbers as an ad format, as part of an effort to bolster its advertising business in emerging markets such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa. The company partnered with Zipdial, and later VivaConnect, to offer this service. Twitter would also offer the ability for users to subscribe to SMS notifications of tweets by celebrities via missed call numbers. a campaign promoting the film
Singham Returns through
Kan Khajura Tesan generated 17 million calls. In 2015, the campaign won a bronze Lion for "Creative Effectiveness". MCM faced criticism; Purani warned that "just as shortsighted abuse of advertising, direct mail and telemarketing has contributed to
spamming-related problems, MCM runs the risk of degenerating into a marketing tool shunned by a large number of phone users." In 2014, India's
Aam Aadmi Party used missed call numbers for a recruitment campaign. In less than a month, the line was used to recruit 700,000 new members.
Spam Missed calls have also been used for
fraudulent purposes in a scam known as "
Wangiri" or "one ring and cut" (from Japanese ). A scammer leaves a missed call using an international
premium rate phone number, trying to lure the recipient into calling back and thus being charged. == Decline in popularity ==