« Good, Better, Best: Marketing Condoms | Main | Researching Everyday Food Culture »
September 22, 2005
Ringtone Marketer Must Turn Down Volume
I'm not a total luddite but I'm just elderly enough that I had no idea that there was such a thing as the Crazy Frog ringtone (based on "the sound of a revving moped"), or that it had a Swedish connection (it was "spawned seven years ago by a Swedish motorcycle enthusiast") or that in the U.K., at least, it was "the first ringtone to enter the pop charts, where it stayed in the No 1 slot for four weeks." So what's the marketing angle? Here's the London Times:
PARENTS claimed a victory over the Crazy Frog after the High Court upheld a ruling that will banish the annoying ringtone advertisements until after the watershed.The company behind the mobile telephone ringtone breached advertising restrictions by appealing to children without making clear the true cost of its products.Almost 300 people complained that Jamba!, based in Germany, did not make clear that its mobile phone services were offered on a weekly, subscription basis rather than a one-off payment. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) found that children had unwittingly run up large phone bills and ruled that the commercials cannot now be shown before 9pm.
The Crazy Frog advertisements were shown on 40,000 occasions during a single month on British television. The post-9pm restriction is intended to place it outside of children’s viewing hours. ... The ASA had previously criticised the commercials for their failure to make clear that the £3 weekly charge was not for one ringtone but a weekly subscription. The watchdog has found that the on-screen warning “16-plus and bill payer’s permission” was insufficient to stop children subscribing to the service via text message.
Not fair, whined the company:
Jamba!, which has sold 11 million Crazy Frog ringtones, argued that its advertisements were not aimed at children and produced evidence that the target purchaser of a Crazy Frog ringtone was aged between 18 and 29.The company said that a ringtone was “a fun item, of no harm to adults or children, and no more expensive than many small items on which a child may spend pocket money”. But the ASA said that the characters had a “strong appeal” to children and that “peer pressure”, and a No 1 Crazy Frog single, had exacerbated the phenomenon.
Jamba! is appealing the ruling. Meanwhile, says the Times, "the telecoms watchdog Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services ... fined the company that supplies the Crazy Frog ringtone to Jamba! £10,000 for sending out unsolicited text messages for a premium-rate auction."
Posted by Deborah Branscum at September 22, 2005 11:17 AM