Stupid, Stupid Operator Creatures

Wow, two Mobitopia posts in the same week! I’m on a roll! In fact, that’s three posts in the whole of March!

Anyway, this post deals with a missed opportunity from an operator to provide a nice new service to sports fans.

Can anyone tell me why the operators make me so angry?

Last night I caught a Vodafone advert I hadn’t seen before. In it, a man is walking around (on his way home from working late or something) and is listening to commentary of a football (by which I mean Football, not football) match.

“Oh,” thinks I, “they must be launching a sports radio service or something, that’s cool.”

The the guy gets home, and it turns out that his wife had her phone sat in front of the television, relaying the TV commentary to her husband’s phone. Vodafone are selling special packs of voice minutes from only 2 pence per minute.

I can just imagine the marketing meeting: “Oh, you know what would make a great advert..?”. I bet they’re all really pleased with themselves.

I’d fire all of them. And the advertising agency.

What the marketing team should have done when somebody suggested the advert is actually think “Wait, that sounds like a service we could offer…”

Let’s assume that you get 2 pence per minute for the 94 minutes of the average football game; that works out at a call cost of GBP 1.88 (possibly slightly higher if you split the call in two halves (as you must) and thus have two connection charges). That’s not an unreasonable price to pay for a footy mad nation like the UK, right? Right. But because of the nature of the setup suggested in the advert, I’m willing to bet the audio quality isn’t as crystal clear as they make it out to be.

So why don’t Vodafone offer audio commentary for GBP 1.99 per match (hell, they could probably get away with GBP 2.99) straight from the TV or radio station covering the event, and give them some cut of the proceeds. I just send a text or click a button on my phone’s browser, the system calls me back, and I get a good quality audio feed direct to the phone? Why don’t they do that?

The advert is bad enough in that I don’t think many women would be prepared to set their phones up like that in the first place (certainly not in front of the living room television, anyway) since they wouldn’t be able to receive calls. And the guy in the advert doesn’t even use a headset – his arm must hurt.

Those stupid, stupid operator creatures make me madder every day.