Cue Another Farce?

Two cellphone SIM cards (bottom and top) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Did  you catch this one? I, for one, didn't I've missed it until I finally tumbled today.

The UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) last week launched a new campaign, 'My number, my identity'. It's probably my fault and certainly not the almost impenetrably obtuse language of the announcement which is clarified by Gulf News today in a story that, try as I might, I could not find online.

We're all going to have to trot off and re-register our mobile SIMs with whichever operator we're with. From July 17th, Etisalat will have over 100 registration points around the country where you can go, eagerly clutching your national ID or passport with visa, and complete an application form to, effectively, re-apply for your mobile phone number. Du didn't confirm its re-registration arrangement intentions to GN in order to make the story, but CEO Osman Sultan, quoted in the TRA release lauding the TRA's campaign, did say customers could go to Du shops.

Many of you will recognise July 17th as the likely starting point for Ramadan, the ideal time to conduct a national campaign of this sort.

Unregistered SIM cards will be cancelled "once the registration period expires" according to the GN story. We haven't been told when that is, or what likely timescale they have in mind.

There are 12.36 million mobile lines out there. It's taken five years for the Emirates ID Authority to 'roll out' the national ID card. How long will it take this campaign I wonder? How many needless frustrations, queues, visits to physical locations and extended deadlines, empty threats, retracted announcements and 'clarifications' are we set to see?

But believe me folks, take this one seriously and get in there early. Because if there's one thing these bohos can do well, it's cut people off...

14

Enigmaticaly, little orange bus stops have started popping up all over Sharjah. The fact that bus stops have popped up isn’t in itself enigmatic: the enigmatic bit is that they all carry the number 14. It must be the Mother of all Bus Routes, the Sharjah Number 14.

There is no other number. Every single bus stop is served by the number 14 bus: from Al Wahda and Al Arouba street right up to the airport and around the university, down to the industrial estate and out to the Emirates Road.

And, of course, this being Sharjah: if every bus stop on every route is numbered 14, then obviously every bus should be a number 14 bus, too. And so it is. Yup: every man jack of ‘em’s a number 14 bus.

This from the place where every roundabout is named as a square.

Ya gotta love it...

Du du du Dah dah dah

I'm a little hesitant to post about Dubai's most splendid and admirable new telecom operator Du again, because last time I took a pop at them the blog was flooded by readers from Du network addresses and picked up some really daft comments from people using Du's corporate network. You can tell they worked for Du because they had Du IPs and they also referred to Du as du which is something only a du employee would Du.

So they care too much, in short.

But I can't resist. We have a new special offer from the telecom operator that likes to say 'Whaaaaaaat?' in the form of a mobile package that offers you a new Du line for a mere 1 Dirham. Yes! Pay only Dhs 55 and get 54 Dhs back in airtime! That means just Dhs 1 for your super Du line!

Except that Dubai's new mobile operator's previous promotion offered subscribers a line for just 1 Dirham! All they had to do was buy a line for Dhs 155 and they got Dhs 154 back in airtime! That meant just Dhs 1 for your line!

The difference, smarter readers will note, is that they've dropped the package price by Dhs 100 ($27 or so, depending on whether we keep the peg of Dhs 3.657 to the Yankee Dollar, which seems likely).

I'm not sure I get it. They're trumpeting a million happy users, but they're dropping their pants on price and the barrier to adoption alike with a promotion that is pricing a new Du line at $15 and presenting it as a 98% cashback deal. Next it'll be a line for Dhs 2 - with Dhs 1 in airtime...

And I still have not had ONE person who has failed the 'Du Test'. So I'm still a little cynical about those million users, too.

If you can't sell a mobile line for Dhs 1 (30-odd cents), what CAN you sell it at? If the barrier to entry, at Dhs 155, is too high in a country with one of the world's highest GDPs per capita, what ARE they getting wrong?

Is dropping price the answer, then, for Du? Or is it time for the company to perhaps consider some smart, differentiated marketing together with a range of targeted service propositions that intelligently segmented audiences in the UAE will buy?

No, I thought not. It's back to mindless jingles and pointless promos then. Watch out for the 'Win a Bar of Gold With Du' promotion. It's only a matter of time...

One Black Acer Promotional Stone

Remember One Red Paperclip? The kid (Kyle MacDonald) that bartered a paperclip in a series of increasingly unlikely and jaw-dropping swaps that saw him eventually get a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan out of it all? Put aside, for a second, the question of whether you'd want to live in Kipling Sakatchewan. Because I’ve had an idea.

It started with the Acer Pointless Promotional Stone, pictured above in loving TechniColour. You see, it was sitting there on my desk after I wrote the grumpy post about the (s) ad campaign that was supposed to promote the Acer Gemstone laptop. I tried giving it away, but colleagues wouldn’t take it – they kept giving it back. One pointed out, quite correctly, that the stone in question had a flaw in it (true) and that it wasn’t a gemstone anyway so what on earth did it have to do with a computer called Gemstone?

Which, I have say, I could only agree with.

So the thing remains sat there on my desk, an object so utterly useless that I can’t even give it away. Which spawned the idea of going one step further than ‘one red paperclip’. I am going to set out to swap my totally useless and fundamentally undesirable stone (an object even less valuable, anyone reasonable would agree, than a paperclip), with the ultimate objective of owning the moon.

I know it might seem like a big leap, but if you think of it more as just a giant step it doesn’t look so daunting. Just to make it more attractive, I am prepared to offer the stone along with the promotional text that accompanied it at no extra charge.

Anyone want to make the first offer?

Marmite

Marmite has produced a limited edition of 300,000 jars made using Guinness yeast. It tastes very nice indeed. Mildly curious as to how they make the stuff, after a lifetime eating it, I wandered onto the website. Because that's what the Internet is for.

Rarely has a site impressed me so much initially and then driven me so surely to rage. It's BLOODY annoying. There's no information there. Nothing. You can learn more about Marmite from Wikipedia. Which is a worry in itself.

The idea's smart. You either love Marmite or hate it, is the thinking - hence the whole themed campaign that Unilever (what, did you think it was home made or something?) has undertaken around the love it/hate it theme. So you have a site that's divided into love heaven and hate hell. Cool. Except that the concept is taken to its idiot extreme by a group of pony-tailed tossers who write 'copy for the kids' like this:

"Eat Marmite? You don't just want to eat it, you want to bathe in it, wallow in it like a hippo in mud, slather yourself from head to toe and wrap yourself in bread and butter... And you know what? That's fine. Just fine. Completely normal in fact..."

That's just a small taste. The site is unremittingly pointless. Here. You decide for yourself. Does going there just prove that it's a great idea? No, because it simply exposes more people to a negative and frustrating experience linked to the brand. Sure, use 'rich content' technologies to make your marketing point and even have a goof around with it to show that your brand is really hip - if you really must. But people want information from company websites before they want funky fun experiences - and if that informaton is simply not available, you're just going to tee them off...

Marmite website? Hate it.

Magic Menon's Revenge

So Mr. Menon and his Magic Marker sniffing team of solvent snorting censors have been busy with the cover art of the Arctic Monkeys' Favourite Worst Nightmare, a most enjoyable collection of songs from those highly celebrated young Northern chaps.

The Menon magic appears to have been necessitated by some clever inner art that takes everyday objects and makes them appear rude, although I don't really know because the marker has done its work well. I have to confess to being irritated by this: I bought a product in good faith only to find that it has been wilfully vandalised and I do think that it would be better if this had not been the case. They wouldn't like it if I put splotches of marker all over their walls and toilets, would they? The least they could do is put a sticker on the outside of the (shrink wrapped) box saying 'This product has been intentionally damaged to protect your morals' or something of the sort. Then at least I'd know to buy it from Amazon instead of the local Virgin shop.

It's not as if the effort isn't rendered pointless through inconsistency. We have Buddha Bar albums in Virgin with the Buddha blacked out, yet Dubai's Grosvenor Hotel sports its very own Buddha Bar in the real. We have a sly bit of Arctic rudery obliterated while 'Tokyo: the sex, the city, the music' is on sale with a topless girl on the front cover. And George Bataille's The Story of the Eye is on sale in the bookshops here: as neat a piece of corruption as you'll find pasted to a spine.


Trawling the web to find out what sparked Magic Menon's ministrations, I did discover that bands are now issuing press releases to announce they have revealed their album art as part of their new release teaser campaigns. Oh, the cynicism...