Orchids and Onions: Clever telemarketing works the best deal for you, MTN

I am no fan of telemarketing, because it’s intrusive and getting people’s backs up before trying to pitch something is not great marketing. Besides, I don’t think I’ve done more than three deals over the phone. (Mind you, that sort of hit rate – out of hundreds of unsolicited messages – is probably considered fantastic by the cutting-edge digital community.)

But if you do know your client and you use the phone to make them a decent offer, this form of selling can be highly effective… never mind being some of the cheapest marketing you can do. This week, MTN called my wife – who has a contract with them – to remind her that she was due for an upgrade. B

ut instead of going for the jugular on a new device offer, MTN’s call centre person put together a package based on retaining the existing device. It was also open to some negotiation – my wife wanted a bit more data and extra minutes, and she got it. It was cheaper than the existing, pay-the-device-off contract. Given that the phone still works, it was the sensible thing to do.

MTN’s approach hit the right spot at the right time and, because it was flexible, won it two years of business for the cost of a phone call. Great, effective marketing… made all the more so because I have been procrastinating about my own Vodacom account and whether or not to dump them because of their lousy service and dodgy data management.

So, MTN, you may have killed two contract birds with one stone here. An Orchid for you. There are plenty of Christmas-type ads doing the rounds – and the most notable are the ones you pick up via social media from overseas brands, because we haven’t done much noteworthy end-of-year commercials here in SA.

So I was taken by the Google re-working of the iconic Home Alone movie which saw child star Macaulay Culkin burst to international prominence as Kevin McAllister, the boy who wreaked havoc when left alone. Google uses the now much older Culkin – did he actually do anything else memorable other than Home Alone? – again in a house by himself, but able to have far more lazy fun because he has Google Assistant to help him.

The voice-activated electronic genius does everything – via connectivity – from turning up the heat to ordering new aftershave, as well as controlling the CCTV cameras around the house and paying online for the pizza… It’s a vision of a digital Utopia. And it puts Google in the benign light of being the sweet, efficient helper which makes your life much easier.

So, in that sense, it’s good advertising and, because it cleverly reprises a classic movie, it will get plenty of people paying attention. So, it deserves an Orchid. At the same time, though, portraying itself as “doing no harm” (as its famous motto was a few years back) and even being the saintly face of capitalism, Google sugar-coats its real aim: to harvest as much information about you as it can to sell on to others.

Many billions of users of Google have already accepted, if they even think about it, that if a service – especially via the internet – is free, then it is the users of that service who are its products. I watched a scary clip recently of a Fox News crew in Washington who carried out an experiment with two Android (Google’s mobile operating system) phones.

They set one to “Airplane mode”, which meant it could not communicate with the outside world and, with the other, removed its SIM card. The crew than went out for a few hours around Washington. Back at the office, they linked both phones to a Wi-Fi device which recorded the bursts of packet information they both sent back to Google as soon as an internet connection was established.

More than 220 separate bits of information – down to whether the person carrying the phone was walking or riding in a car – was sent back to the search engine company. Even a private eye tailing them could not have got as much information.

That’s really worrying, if you believe in real freedom… So the Culkin video, because it can be viewed as misleading propaganda rather than marketing, also deserves an Onion.

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