Circles.Life pokes fun at Singtel and Starhub in ad addressed to ‘telco friends in red and green’
A print ad for telecom firm Circles.Life took numerous potshots at the competition, particularly Singtel and Starhub.
Claiming to be a message from the Circles.Life founders, the ad riffed on recent initiatives from much larger telco firms and claimed frustration with these companies as Circles.Life’s reason for existence.
The ad said: “You’ve finally recognised that your customers aren’t happy. As former subscribers, we get it. Lock-in contracts, poor customer service, rigid mobile plans. Simply put, they don’t spark joy. As efficient as life is in Singapore, it’s hard to believe that telcos still operate this way.
“That’s why we created Circles.Life. Imagine that – being so frustrated that we didn’t just port out, we built a telco for all the frustrated Singaporeans like us.
“We gave the power back to the customer, the power we didn’t have as your former customers.”
The ad also advertised a new plan with significantly more data for both existing and new subscribers. According to a Circles.Life spokesperson, the idea was conceptualised in-house by the marketing team and executed with VMLY&R. The telco recently appointed VMLY&R as creative agency of record and hired Mindshare to handle the media side of the business.
If only Circles spent as much time fixing their own sign up and onboarding processes before taking pops at competitors. Example: I signed up for 2 simcards, their ‘machine learning’ gave wrong port number at bottom of page and right one at top – spent 15 mins on chat trying to confirm right one. Simcards came, no idea which is which. Now trying to sign up for another simcard and their delivery date selection is broken on their website so it’s impossible (choose a day, get confirmed a different day). I’m all for funny marketing, in fact I applaud it… but make sure you can actually onboard customers first eh?
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