Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Make Money the Easy Way with Telstra
Do you remember when credit card companies introduced award schemes to encourage you to whack all your expensive home entertainment gear onto plastic, and build up points for your trip to Bali?
Do you remember also that an unpleasant side effect of this was the awkward silence at the end of a delightful restaurant meal with your friends, when they’d all dutifully doled out the cash for their share of the bill, and you’d calmly gather it up, stash it in your wallet, and casually flick your plastic into the saucer and say, “I think I’ll just put it all on credit, you don’t mind do ya?”
They’d naturally give a dismissive wave of their hand and say, “Nah, go right ahead”, and give a slightly strangled laugh. Of course you just knew that when they climbed into their cars, safely out of earshot, just the couples together with no constraints, you knew exactly what they’d be talking about. You knew that she’d be in his ear. Nagging. “Why did you let Rex pay with his card Phil?”. “What’s wrong with you? You’re just hopeless, you should have grabbed it first”, and poor Phil, who’d always had an inferiority complex anyway would just feel smaller and more pathetic than he already was.
Well my friends. There’s good news aplenty in the pages of Rupert’s Organ of Freedom today. Word has it that Telstra has come up with an absolute cracker of a marketing plan to squeeze more revenue out of the mobile phone market. A market whose growth curve is tragically and horrifically curving, if not exactly southward, then certainly less northward than it has been.
The plan is delightful in its devilish simplicity. Telstra will give you a 5 cent per minute credit on your mobile for all incoming calls.
You’ve got it my friends. That little click you just heard is the sound of the light-bulb going on in your head.
Now you know your mission. Whenever anyone calls you, you’ve got to keep them talking. You’ve got to string that conversation out to those one-minute boundaries. I’m going to be contacting Telstra to see if they can make my mobile give a little cash-register “ka-ching” sound for each minute that I keep my callers on the line. And I’ve already programmed the most important TXT message into my phone. One that I'll be using to get in touch with my friends. Simple and to the point it says: “CALL ME NOW”.
Also, I’ll be making it clear to Phil that instead of just meeting me at the rubbity-dub on a Friday after work like we used to do, he needs to call me first on my mobile. I’m going to keep Phil on the phone, even as we converge on the pub from opposite ends of town, I’m going to keep him on the phone until he can convince me that he’s not bringing his wife.
It’s for his own good after all.
Note: 3000 character limit on comments Do you remember also that an unpleasant side effect of this was the awkward silence at the end of a delightful restaurant meal with your friends, when they’d all dutifully doled out the cash for their share of the bill, and you’d calmly gather it up, stash it in your wallet, and casually flick your plastic into the saucer and say, “I think I’ll just put it all on credit, you don’t mind do ya?”
They’d naturally give a dismissive wave of their hand and say, “Nah, go right ahead”, and give a slightly strangled laugh. Of course you just knew that when they climbed into their cars, safely out of earshot, just the couples together with no constraints, you knew exactly what they’d be talking about. You knew that she’d be in his ear. Nagging. “Why did you let Rex pay with his card Phil?”. “What’s wrong with you? You’re just hopeless, you should have grabbed it first”, and poor Phil, who’d always had an inferiority complex anyway would just feel smaller and more pathetic than he already was.
Well my friends. There’s good news aplenty in the pages of Rupert’s Organ of Freedom today. Word has it that Telstra has come up with an absolute cracker of a marketing plan to squeeze more revenue out of the mobile phone market. A market whose growth curve is tragically and horrifically curving, if not exactly southward, then certainly less northward than it has been.
The plan is delightful in its devilish simplicity. Telstra will give you a 5 cent per minute credit on your mobile for all incoming calls.
You’ve got it my friends. That little click you just heard is the sound of the light-bulb going on in your head.
Now you know your mission. Whenever anyone calls you, you’ve got to keep them talking. You’ve got to string that conversation out to those one-minute boundaries. I’m going to be contacting Telstra to see if they can make my mobile give a little cash-register “ka-ching” sound for each minute that I keep my callers on the line. And I’ve already programmed the most important TXT message into my phone. One that I'll be using to get in touch with my friends. Simple and to the point it says: “CALL ME NOW”.
Also, I’ll be making it clear to Phil that instead of just meeting me at the rubbity-dub on a Friday after work like we used to do, he needs to call me first on my mobile. I’m going to keep Phil on the phone, even as we converge on the pub from opposite ends of town, I’m going to keep him on the phone until he can convince me that he’s not bringing his wife.
It’s for his own good after all.
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