September 29, 2007

A lot of my old friends know this story.

But none of my new friends and definitely none of my readers!

At the end of 2004 my parents sat our family down and said “kids, noone will let us refinance - either we move to Frankston (which is a TERRIBLE suburb) or you move out. Within a second all of us had said “Ok, we’ll move out!

They sold up the place and bought a little townhouse in a not-as-bad suburb called Carrum Downs. At the time I was working as a KFC assistant manager and was doing ok… But I had to wait until my 90 day evaluation was up before my mortgage loan was approved.

I didn’t pass my 90 day evaluation because I was a really crappy fast food manager. I was way too nice. And not motivated at all…. I was shattered, not to lose the crappy job but because I felt I had let my brothers down. I wanted to put them up in my place but was not going to be able to.

Since then I have shot up my credit rating (stupid decision by a 19 year old) and can’t even get a personal loan. Whoops.

I have blogged about Tiger Airways before….

They’re that new low cost airline making headlines everywhere. The thing with low cost airlines is that they cut costs at every available opportunity and charge you for ANYTHING extra. Nothing’s complimentary, only the seat.

I made a booking with them for a flight from the Gold Coast to Melbourne in December but they didn’t confirm by email, as is industry norm.

I called them up to make sure the booking had worked and pressed 2 to enquire about a current booking.

This is when it got interesting.  A message comes up saying “the call centre is currently busy. Press 0 if you wish to call another time or 1 if you want to continue.”

I didn’t press anything and they disconnected me.

I rung back and went through the process again and pressed 1. But get this, they were asking me to press 1 every 45 seconds. After 2 minutes this gets quite tiring. And if you don’t press 1 quickly enough, BUB-bye!

When I got through to the call centre, I could barely understand what the woman was saying between a dodgy connection, my voice echoing through her headset and her bad English.

Frustrating! Moral of the story is.. there is no moral. Fly Tiger!

There’s a whole bunch of advertising firms and marketers busy trying to crack the internet… or at least use the internet as part of their ‘holistic synergised buzz recruiting marketing campaign.’

Ski Yogurt has created probably the best attempt yet with their Lucky Fruit campaign.

It’s quite funny… you can go watch the ads at their site. Basically it details the plight of the ‘unlucky fruit’, the stuff that wasn’t quite good enough to make it into a Ski product. (The idea obviously that they have a John West attitude, except not with Tuna.)

Users have the opportunity to make their own unlucky fruit ads and send them in. I have no idea why someone would do this, as there doesn’t seem to be any prize incentive involved. So far, three people have done so.

Good luck to Ski with this but it’s such an up-hill slog doing buzz marketing on the internet, people automatically tune out when they know they are being sold to. People hate a counterfeit. What I’m trying to say is, the words ‘generate’ and ‘buzz’ have a LOT of difficulty peacefully co-existing. Buzz just happens. I’d like to see how Ski goes with this, as they have just handed their ad agency a boatload of money on a concept that is still very untested.