PCOEN@drew.bitnet (Paul Coen) (01/06/91)
I saw one of the newer AT&T commercials the other night, and
something about it bothered me. I listened very carefully the next
few times, and came to the same conclusion -- the spot is misleading.
The basic premise is that one of "those other" phone companies
calls just as the career woman is going out for a business trip. She
tells them to bug off, because she wants to make sure that when she
calls home to say "hi" to the kids she wants them to sound just like
they're "next door."
I could be mistaken, but this seems to be implying that the
default carrier on your home phone is the carrier that INCOMING calls
to your home are carried on -- which is wrong. It would be much more
useful to have the commercial say that you should dial 10-ATT/10288
from any payphone (she's shown calling from one) to guarantee "good
AT&T service."
Now, the question is that is this a deliberate attempt to make
people feel that if they switch, incoming calls will automatically be
of poor sound quality, or is it just the failure of someone in the ad
agency (or whoever else writes these things) to grasp that incoming
calls aren't normally determined by the default long distance service
of the party being called? I'd be inclined to believe the latter.
Any thoughts on this? I could have misunderstood the
commercial, but I don't think that I did.
Disclaimer -- I like AT&T for the most part :-).
The preceeding may not even be my opinions, never mind Drew U.'s
Paul Coen Academic Computer Center Drew UniversityEd_Greenberg@3mail.3com.com (01/08/91)
Paul Coen <PCOEN@drew.bitnet> writes about a possibly misleading AT&T advert, in which is is implied that changing carriers will affect incoming call quality. I immediately associated the premise that changing LD carriers would affect quality of calls home with the use of a calling card. The problem here is that it isn't clear that one can have one LD service and originate calls on any service, both at home and away. The most important thing to remember though is that these ads are not designed to educate and inform, but to create an emotional response. By training us to have an emotionally positive response to AT&T, and a negative response to the concept of any other LD carriers, AT&T hopes to have us suspend our skepticism with respeect to their claims, while rejecting out of hand the claims and offers of others. edg