September 2007

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.

This post is for people who live in metropolitan areas in Australia.

Since starting work, I’ve noticed that it’s a bit of a fad amongst my colleagues to have a window open with the current weather radar images (http://www.bom.gov.au). They also have a 4-image loop so you can predict which way the rain is heading.

This is so useful. The other day I was going to go play golf but the weather was really ominous so I went and checked the radar and I could see the rain was going to slip past the golf course. The result was 2 hours of fun with a good friend of mine.

When I finished work yesterday I checked the radar and saw rain was about to hit, so I stayed in the office. I waited 2 minutes and then the rain hit really good. As soon as it was obviously passing on the radar I stepped out and took the 15 minute walk to my car. Not too long after I started driving, it rained again.

Given how effective it is to use that tool to prevent rain, I’m surprised more people don’t do that!