Tag Archive for 'Advertisement'

Virgin Mobile India: Something “different”?

Published on 26th Oct 2008 in Indian Telecom, Tata Indicom and virgin mobile. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Virgin Mobile is going full throttle with it’s advertising blitz; I remember, there was some issue with it’s licence because it was a virtual network operator. Tata claims that it isn’t. The truth, as to who fathered it, is not known to anyone.

The “bastard” of this company is trying to grab attention like an unwanted company. It makes tall claims about it’s “superior network coverage” and it’s “young outlook”. Pooh. Who the f*** cares about it anyway? On what basis has it made these claims? It’s hard to discount it, nevertheless, we could take it with a pinch of salt anyway.

Their website is an overdose of flashturbation. Its a bad idea to attract the dudes who have no decent access to broadband. In anycase, it chokes on my crappy bandwidth of BSNL at home.

I have no clue about the new “execs” at the helm of the affairs but if their CEO is a rich bored millionaire who has nothing else to do excpet launching himself in hot air balloons or dance with skimpy chicks, it speaks a lot about the professional attitude of a company. It doesnt promote the seriousness with which it needs to be taken; instead I have a creepy feeling that they are just fly by night operators.

The idiots need to realise it that a strong message doesnt go by having whacky advertisements. Drop down the prices, subisdise the cost of the handsets and bleed the new players by being able to offer services based on quality. I still have to come across a subscriber of this company who has said anything positive about there efforts. I wouldnt be surprised if they give in free mobiles with a rider of a locked in period. Unless they have enough balls to do it.

BIG Tv

Published on 15th Sep 2008 in Indian Telecom. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

They made a huge splash over their advertisement.

It is lame. Truly. I did come across their blog where they have attempted to “reach out their customers”. At best, it only shows snippets of their website and their product.

Here is the guy who made this commercial. And here is the making of the commercial:

Why this interest in DTH? I have joined as a Reliance customer because I needed their unlimited calling facility. So far, selling their multimedia enabled handsets would allow them to leverage their cross media holdings to reach out to a ready pool of customers. Mercifully, I have been included in their DND list or I would have been spammed about Anil Ambani’s latest venture. I was surprised to see Reliance Web world selling and renting out movies too; in addition to their “broadband”.

DTH remains another of their pipe dreams; it would be interesting to watch them battle it out for the customer’s wallets.

IPTV India: Against DTH?

Published on 15th Aug 2008 in General Thoughts. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Viewers are spoilt for choice. DTH is a credible option and at the start of the day, I had no frigging clue to the pent up demand for the same. The Direct To Home players like Tatas and Zee have spent oodles of cash on advertisements and hardware roll out that it appears unlikely that a newer player would be able to get a toehold.

Here in the grand strategy of Anil Ambani unfolds. He got the ad labs, poured in money in content creation and would make a huge moolah out of “exclusive” deals with media players. The value added services is a growing market and there is a HUGE space for exclusive content; I was surprised to know that there is a seperate channel for gardening; Tata has one for home tuitions. Although, it cannot replace the classrooms but then parents are keen for any degree of experimentation.

Coming back to IPTV. Does anyone of you readers think that this could make any degree of impact on the viewership? I feel that most of the people mistrust the landline outages (which are so frequent) unless there is a fibre to home coming to their homes with simple instructions to operate the set top box. The present hardware is designed to confuse the first time users; somewhere it ought to ring the bell to make it as simple as possible.

I would reserve my comments on the two competing platforms till the market matures up. Reliance is lying down low with it’s broadband offering. I am still wondering as to what has been the issue at their end. Why are they delaying the commercial launch? There are any number of ideas floating around and if they claim to be India’s number one network as far as the coverage is concerned, they ought to focus on their cherries. Or else, it would die a virgin.

Airtel Broadband: Wow customer services

Published on 04th Aug 2008 in Indian Telecom. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Airtel Broadband offers customer servie levels unheard of in the industry. My splitter wire had gone kaput for some reason. I called up the customer care for the non functioning Internet. Within 2 hours, there was a dude at my doorstep. After fixing the fault, he gave me a receipt of the fixed fault, made me talk to a person sitting in the backend to close the complaint who cross checked with me regarding his complaints.

From close conversation, it was clear that the “engineers” are trained IT professionals. This is a drudgery job but someone has to do it. For every “colony”, there is a designated professional who handles about 10-15 complaints on an average. They offer their numbers because once you lodge in a complaint, the call gets “locked” and it is company’s hassle to resolve the issue within 4 hours. They make these claims in the advertisements and it works most of the times under ideal conditions. I was impressed with these people and their handling of the issue in a clean manner.

Airtel Broadband has a long way to go and they are selling their connections majorly on the strength of their Broadband expertise. The jury is out there and I wouldn’t be wrong in claiming that this is one of the best ISP’s in business. I have never faced a downtime; barring this issue but then this was a fault in the splitter wire worn out of use. Excellent.

Here is a message to other companies. Tone up your service levels and customer delight would follow. It only demands an attention to detail, scale up the protocols and review of the services. At end of the day, customer is the king and he deserves it so.

Virgin India Mobile: New take

Published on 01st Jun 2008 in General Thoughts. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

They came with a bang and ended up with a whimper. There were many people to take on their claims and their initial “thrust” seems to have slowed down; I hardly see their advertisements in the media. TRAI questioned about the “intentions” and it seems that Tata’s efforts to roll out a “brand exercise” fizzled out. I haven’t recieved any official communication from Virgin India mobile but their PR division seems to be active online.

This is in response to the earlier post; their PR division has hired some lady called as Priya. She minces no words when she leaves comments on this blog like “fucking losers”. She claims that she is being unduly victimised online on this blog and something like this :

i suppose this blog has got u some sort of clicks since its a bunch of pansies taking on a girl online…otherwise “crap” and “fart” as usual.

It’s easier not to bother about the punctuation. As far as “pansies” taking a girl online, speak of gender equality!

I gave adeqaute coverage to their point of view as well; unfortunately, they chose to complicate the matters in the email and then claim that they don’t want to reach out to independent bloggers. I can’t help someone’s perception of calling us names; it only exposes their own shortcomings to come to terms with life. People of this bent of mind are often suicidal and have desperate tendencies. They are the ones who end up having nervous breakdowns, grope in dark and extremely prone to hurt themselves and the people around them. Such people need to be handled with care under the expert supervision of a shrink.

Get some life sweetheart. And stop feeling deluded about being persecuted.

Airtel Broadband Offensive Advertisement

Published on 24th Mar 2008 in Airtel Broadband. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Airtel Broadband Advertising

This is just the worst form of advertising being done by Bharti Airtel. These guys need to think about the message they are conveying to the end customer.

Sam noticed the Xbox 360 videogame controller in the graphic… So perhaps the company is trying to say… Play videogames online on Airtel Broadband and you would have a life. Otherwise, you ought to be ashamed of it!

Virgin India Mobile: New service that never happened

Published on 09th Mar 2008 in Indian Telecom. 14 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Virgin Mobile was deflowered by Department of Telecom for not complying with licence norms. For those who have come late, Virgin Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator. They tied up with Tatas and wee about to start off their services here in India.

I fired an email to their PR division. Their comments came in an attachment; not a good PR strategy in my opinion. They should have sent a seperate email or should have had a logo prominently displayed.

Here is the exact copy. My comments appear in italics in paranthesis.

1) Is Virgin a Mobile Virtual Network Operator independently acting in India?
Virgin Mobile services are being offered to consumers by Tata Teleservices through a brand franchise with the Virgin Group. This means that Virgin Mobile is a brand of Tata Teleservices. This brand franchise is within the permitted norms of license agreement of Tata Teleservices (Confused statements. Nevertheless, the supposed licence agreements have been invalidated by Department of Telecom in their wisdom. The email from the PR division came in before this happened).

2) Do you have a tie up with Tata Teleservices?

Virgin Mobile India is an equitable partnership (then what is the brand frachise?)between Virgin Group and Tata Teleservices. Virgin Mobile India will provide Tata Teleservices with experience and expertise in designing, marketing, and servicing Virgin Mobile branded products for the youth segment.

3) Who has designed your website?
Need inputs (Ha! They don’t know the name of their web designer!!! This has been prominently displayed on their home page. At first, I realised the futility of the question AFTER I had sent the email. However, even I was not prepared for their answer. Anyone with the right brains could have easily figured that out. Despite all the flash, it is choked of coding errors- a common refrain of most of the websites not designed to comply with web standards).

4) Why do you make service guarantees for network availability? Are you 100% sure that your network would not fail as compared to other service providers?
Virgin Mobile places huge importance on ensuring that we deliver a high quality service to customers. This philosophy pervades in everything that we do- quality of network, range of handsets, value added services on offer, customer care etc. We chose Tata Teleservices because we believe it has the best quality network in India (Who decides that?). According to published reports (where?), Tata Teleservices has the lowest dropped call rates and one of the lowest blocking rates in the industry(how?). This means that ‘Virgin Mobile’ branded customers will reliably be able to enjoy clear calls, a fast connection and low dropped-call rates(Low dropped call rates? Despite the network, customers would still experience call drops! Even though, they may be low by industry standards!!!).

5) Why did you choose to go ahead with Virgin?
Virgin brings extensive experience and expertise in targeting the youth market across 7 countries over the last 8 years. It is this experience, service innovation and ability to catch the pulse on the youth market that makes Virgin a perfect partner for our ‘youth’ brand.

All in all, it remains a perfect example of PR crap. Tata seriously needs a reality check. They have honest intentions; they need to tap the youth market. Their perception in the market is jaded and also ran; which is different from say Hutch. Most of the companies are aspiring for “youth tag” and hope that it would add “zing” to the company.

Why youth? They aspire for a better lifestyle and if a brand fits in their perceptions of being the “right one”, they would splurge on it. It remains true for the metros as well as the smaller towns and cities. However, Virgin Mobile would need massive advertising money to cause a “brand recall”, just like they have associated a dog with Hutch. For the same reason, having Shah Rukh Khan for Airtel has not worked well because he endorses many other brands. Further, Airtel’s marketing division is pits.

I feel that the PR divisions needs a better infusion of brains than the current crop of retards that presently infest them. They need to tone up their language primarily because flowery English doesnt work. Unless someone is looking at impressing some starry eyed nut.

By the way, their website designer is bcwebwise. It speaks very highly of it’s boss who is an ex journo and has ventured in web designing. It has jarring colours and as usual coding errors :) Not a very comforting thought to pay dollops of money to those who cant even ensure compliance to web standards.

Update: I got an email from their PR agency saying that the attachment was sent by mistake. They wanted to send a further email from their PR agency regarding the new development of licence norms. They wanted my telephone number in order to speak to me and clarify issues.

Incidentally, Virgin India came with front page advertisement on 10/03/2008 in Delhi edition of Times of India. They are paying the customers to recieve incoming calls. In my opinion, this is basically a gimmick to lure in customers initally; their call rates are almost similar as that of other operators.

I shall keep this post updated as and when newer developments happen.