advertising greed is bad for your brand health

here is one more practice of marketers and ad agencies that i honestly could not understand. we don't even have to go back to advertising principles, we just have to apply common sense.

we call it advertising greed.

globe handyphone customer service telephone hotline - when you call their telephone hotline, they don't immediately connect you to the menu of services you want to know about nor to the customer service agent who is supposed to help you with your problems. what you hear instead is this audio spiel that advertises their latest service offering or promotion. if it is the first time for you to call this number, you need to listen to the whole spiel before you get connected to the person you want to talk to. that is, if by the time the spiel ends there is already a customer service agent who is already free to handle your call. if not, you will here some irritating music on the line.

we really don't get that. the whole idea behind putting up a telephone hotline is to provide customer service efficiently and QUICKLY. during the days before the invention of the term "customer satisfaction" and call centers, it tool a long time to get anything done to help customers on their complaints on the service or get information. the telephone and call center is supposed to eliminate that problem of decades ago.

running that audio spiel violates that very principle of "quick and efficient" customer service hotline. it actually delays it rather than quicken it.

we like advertising but we do not think this is a smart thing to do. the customer hotline is one area where we think it is counter-productive to out an ad in. most people call these numbers to complain about a service or to fix a service problem. it is to the interest of globe and the the appreciation of customers that these are quickly resolved.

we have been watching the FIFA world cup on tv at balls cable tv. what gets us is that when they cut to the showing of ads, the ad break is very long, at least 5 minutes worth of ads. and this is what kills us - some of the tv ads are shown not once, not twice but often times more than 5 times!

what is the point of showing the same ad for more than once? they forgot that you are supposed to develop ads that work even when seen only once by the audience. there is not advantage in showing the same ad to the same audience in the same commercial break for more than 5 times.

it is stupid to expect that the audience will actually watch the same ad 5 times in a row! didn't the ad agency, client and the cable tv operator know all tv sets now come with a remote control unit? it's easy to expect that the audience will click the remote and watch another tv channel while the ads are running. many tv sets have the picture in picture feature, the audience who switches channels during the long commercial break will not miss a thing when the game is put back on.

why do clients and ad agencies do these things? what is the point of advertising greed when the audience has the power not to view the repeated ads with the remote control? or when an ad is forcibly broadcast to the audience who is in no mood to listen to an ad from the service provider?

advertising greed does not make a sale, nor does it build brand equity, all it does is annoy the audience and a definite WAWAM!

babes in orange mini dress arrested for ambush marketing in 2010 world cup

wow! this is shocking - we did not know ambush marketing can get you arrested! marketers can be criminals after all.

dutch bavaria beer sent a few dozen babes in orange mini dress to watch the dutch games at the world cup in south africa. the beer company paid for the airfare for the babes to watch the game and obviously the orange mini dress. the girls entered the stadium in regular clothes and at a specific time they all remove their clothes to reveal the orange mini dress.

then the girls started the whoopi. how often do you see that many babes in mini dress doing the whoopi in the way they did it? so they got a lot of attention, cell phone cameras took the video, the men around them whooped it up, too. they did not complain, they just enjoyed all of it,

however, there were those who complained - the men at the other of the stadium who were too far to see eye to eye with the babes in orange dress. the other complaint was from fifa who had them arrested.

well, fifa did not have them arrested and charged in court for the mini dresses but for violating the sponsorship and marketing deals for the games. apparently bavaria was not a sponsor of the games. the babes in mini dress were accomplices for the alleged crime.

fifa are such party poopers!

read here:

http://g.sports.yahoo.com/soccer/world-cup/blog/dirty-tackle/post/Two-Dutch-mini-dress-models-arrested-after-defyi?urn=sow,248867

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article506153.ece/Fans-in-minis-bust-in-undies

this we think is excellent ambush marketing. not only because the babes wore mini dresses but the whole idea of ambushing such an event. bavaria obviously got what they wanted - they got the attention of every dutch male in the audience and at home, plus the global audience and everyone else who went to this blog. i bet bavaria beer's brand awareness and likability scores went up the roof after the game.

it made me thirsty for bavaria beer. will get some tonight.

the magic of magicJack in the philippines

if you are in the US, for sure you have heard of magicJack, it's heavily advertised and widely available in the supermarkets. magicJack is a VOIP telephone service where you connect this magicJack gadget into your computer USB and then connect your telephone to the mahicJack. the driver will load and you are ready to call anyone in the US and canada for free.

well, not entirely free but almost free - the magicJack costs $39.95 for the first year, included shipping and for succeeding years you pay $19.95 per year. you can make all the calls you want, in the philippine context you can make unlimited calls to any number in the US and Canada at no cost.


the good news - this works in the philippines, too!we have been using the magicJack in the philippines to call folks in the US on a regular basis. it's used often - an hour or so almost every day and it works just fine. the voice quality is very clear. at times it gets garbled and with an echo but it rarely happens. if that happens, just hang up and call again. it's recommended that no other computer uses the DSL connection when you are using the magicJack as there is at times some interference.

these are really very minor problems. the amount of hours we have been spending using the magicJack to call the US is very much worth the annual fee and the occasional problems.

the magicJack is actually available locally. there is a local company that sells the unit but it is not worth buying from them as it is more than double the cost of getting it from the US while the annual fee is more  than triple the cost in the US.


what is the go around on this horrendous local cost? ask your friends and relatives from the US to buy the magicJack in the US and ask them to have the unit shipped to you in the philippines. once it arrives to your philippine home by courier, you can immediately use it. of course your friend in the US will need to shoulder the initial cost of it. you will probably need a credit card to continue the service after the first year.

a marketing note : the local company selling the magicJack in the philippines unfortunately is just like many other local companies in the philippines - they are terribly profit hungry. just like many other local companies that engage in services or products from the US, this company is too greedy in pricing the product and service twice to three times the cost in the US. but that is another topic.

apple's new iPhone 4 and iPad - a second chance to market leadership for globe telecoms

we read in an internet posting globe telecoms has slid to 3rd in total number of subscribers recently and have been overtaken by sun cellular. we will not discuss that now here as we still need to verify the numbers but that is a very sad state of affairs for globe.

sun is a crappy service. the only thing going for it is its unlimited calls and text but the service is pretty bad - texts take a long time to reach the other party if it reaches it at all and voice calls are very often choppy and garbled, not to mention frequent dropped calls and "service is unavailable" error messages. we can't even call the sun cell service as good value, nothing much is good about it and its value questionable. "cheap" is the only appropriate word to use for it.

with that profile, you can understand why it is a sad state of affairs that sun is able to overtake globe in number of subscribers. in many ways, it hurts less if the brand that overtakes your brand is superior than yours but for an inferior brand to achieve it, that hurts pretty bad.

BUT apple's latest - the iPhone 4 and iPad is here. globe is the exclusive partner of apple in the philippine market for the iPhone. we assume it will continue to be so for apples newest toys.

the iPhone 4 by all measures, that means the tech reviewers are going crazy over the latest version. it will have a new OS (iOS4) and has new and really great features. to name a few - a great display, longer battery life, a gyroscope and 2 cameras (back and front facing). almost all the tech reviewers this new iPhone is apple's best and a sure winner for consumers.

the other is the iPad which has taken the market by storm. before launch, it was a product nobody could place. people were excited about it. almost any new apple product excited people but this one was hard to place where it can be in the tech market. apple launched it and it was an instant success. it has sold 2 million units in just 2 months and it continue to escalate. by all accounts, the only barrier for further growth in unit sales for the iPad is the speed by which apple's factories can manufacture the gadget.

what this means is that apple has 2 excellent products that globe can use to spring it's subscriber base up. but the question is- has globe learned it's lesson the first time it launched the iPhone in the market?

the launch of the original iPhone was also an instant hit in the US market and in most markets it was sold. it was first sold in the US and apple stores had long lines of consumers waiting outside apple stores to get their hands on it. almost all of these consumers who lined up were there from the previous night, all of them camping out during the night just so they are able to get their hands on the iphone.

no such crazy adulation occurred in the philippines when globe launched it here. we have previously written about it before here and we said the reason for the absence of excitement for the iphone was the pricing strategy that globe adapted for the iphone. globe bevame greedy - they over-priced it so much so that very few could afford the iphone,

we also wrote that globe could have used the iphone as key marketing tool to get leadership away from smart. globe then was second to smart.

with the iphone 4 and the ipad appearing to be a real winner technologically and by techies acclaim, perhaps globe will be smart enough to bring back the sun into their subscriber base by doing the right thing the second time around. (pun intended)

creating a string of successes through timing - the iPhone and the iPad

in this week's news, steve jobs said they started to developed the iPad ahead of the iPhone but they decided to launch the iPhone first and shelved the iPad work in the meantime.

it is hindsight but we think it was a brilliant move.

the iPad competes in the tablet sub segment of the computer market and during that time many tablet brands have failed. apple may very well have failed too if they launched the iPad then.

launching the iPhone ahead of the iPad was a good move as the iPhone was unique in the market it was getting launched into, its success in the market place was easier and more assured. there were no other cellphones during that time that had the features that the iPhone had. uniqueness is one of the key success factors in the launch of any new product.

the iPhone also prepared and in many ways built a lot of anticipation and excitement on the iPad. by the time the iPad launched, consumers have become familiar with the new touch technology that the iPhone had. apple also was already hugely successful with the iTunes and the app store. these were critical partners to the success of the iPhone. with consumers already knowing the success of the iPhone iTunes and the app store, the iPad became a very easu sell to consumers.

the sales numbers on the iPad are impressive - it has sold its 1 million unit much faster than the iPhone did and many analysts are now revising their sales projections on the iPad, more units than previous estimates.

launch timing in this one helped the success of a new product launch.