Speaking up: Costly Advertising Traps
This is some very interesting information about what can easily be called false advertising of some kind.
Its to do with the free for three minutes package being advertised by Digicel.
Its from Bango's Speaking Up Blog..thanks Rok.
Click on the Underlined heading and have a read and lets hear your comments.
Action is required now.
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5 comments:
Interesting. Well a consumer body would contact Digicel to verify the precise meaning of the advertising and then test it. AFter many years of having a start-up insuranc investment I realised that my expectations from their advertising was wrong. Fortunately, misleading information can be challenged at the Fair Trading Commission (FTC) And bad publicity is noticed by the corporate culprits.
Hallam Hope
Hi Roosevelt
Shouldn't you be putting pen to paper and inform the FTC of this alleged deception with a copy to Digicel?
The problem will not go away if we do nothing.......at least we should try!!
Agreed we should also tell our friends & family to avoid these ads.
Regards
Doug
Hi Doug,
First, however, is the need to provide consumers and ourselved with unquestionable evidence that the advertisement and reality are not one and the same.
Testing this on prepaid would be easy and cost a few dollars. It would require say three persons to do so and note how the money was deducted based on time/usage. As documented information which the three persons can sign off on then this becomes the type of evidence one can take to Digicel and copy to the FTC.
If there is no satisfactory response from Digicel then one could make a case to the FTC and as you say let people know about it, blow by blow.
I have post paid so I can't check this quickly.
The FTC can dismiss speculation, claims, opions etc. It cannot dismiss " empirical evidence". It it does then it can be embarrassed as an organisation that is not functioning aka my published letter, which I also posted on Barbados Free Press Press, Rum Shop, emailed to user groups etc.
It was interesting last evening to hear the CTUSAB chap Dennis Depeiza making the link between the profits and lay offs. I was in a rum shop last night and an ordinary citizen understood the connection.
Surely, the Digicel advertisement can be tested?
Any volunteers with prepaid Digicel phones for this project?
Rest assured that I have done my part but in a more subtle way. This is a characteristic of the industry in Barbados and in my humble opinion, the political will is not yet in place or not yet there to deal with this duopoly.
From the inception of the liberalization of cell phones, these two have deceived Barbadians and indeed Caribbean people. In Barbados for example, we were given a rate, usually the providers rate on their platform only to but up on the shock of a higher rate for crossing platforms.
In terms of packages you were given the package but you were not told of the penalties for going over your allotted time. That too was a shock. Furthermore, agents never sold more than a certain amount of minutes to individuals, so if your requirement is more, you were saddled with the penalties because they refused to upgrade your package.
Furthermore, how does one classify sending text to win a prize? What when it cost 75 cent for each text you send? Sounds like gambling to me. The more you play the more likely you can win???. So to win a prize worth $200 a person can decide to spend $75 in text messaging??? What really is that, especially when you don’t have to answer a question or demonstrate a skill in order to win? That is straight gambling. Is Digicel licensed to gamble? Sounds like they doing another business on the side.
ROK
Yes sometimes they spent too much on advertising.
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