o2: Free long weekend calls. Sort of.
Caught this ad on the tube. In fairness it’s difficult not to catch it. It’s all over the place.
So, free calls every Saturday, Sunday and Monday? Neat! There’s a piece of explanatory text to the left (not shown) saying ‘limited to 2,000 minutes a month’.
I felt that degraded the delight of the reader. It’s a pretty compelling offer which is brought into the cold light of day by the ‘limited to…’ text.
This subconsciously (or consciously, depending on how you’re reading it) tells me that the advert is absolute rubbish. They’d be better saying ‘2,000 minutes a month to use Sat, Sun & Mon’ — for this is actually what they’re selling.
Thus they’re guaranteeing every single person reading the ad goes ‘ooooh cool… then reads the disclaimer.
Why disappoint? Isn’t the market that challenging? Why try and fool the reader? How many people actually do 2,000 minutes a month? Of course you need a fair use policy but surely it’s only the small amount of nutters on the phone the whole day that you need to call and have a quiet word with. Everyone else should be delighting in using their o2 connection with abandon.
Surely in this age of spin one or two marketers at o2 might have thought that it’s about time someone talked straight to the mobile buying public, thus:
1. Spent at least 35 quid a month on contract with us
2. We won’t bill you for calls made on Sat, Sun or Mon
Then make your disclaimer something like this:
If you take the piss, then reserve the right to move you to a different price plan.
But OBVIOUSLY if you’ve got your customers chatting away with abandon on Sat, Sun and Mon, they’ll begin to find it more and more difficult to distinguish between days as their usage increases — and ergo you should get more revenue. If you don’t get more revenue, then you know what, don’t worry, at least the 35 quid is going to you and not your competitor.
