Ok, the weird headline aside I saw this great offer from a cell phone company that is up-and-coming named Cricket. I don’t know if you have this company in your local area because I believe it originated here in Austin which is my own stopping grounds.

The ad brought to mind a cross between an extremely well done Madison Avenue ad mixed with a homeless person holding a sign saying “Will work for Food”. You’ll see why in a minute.

I was watching TV on one of the Houston, Texas television stations and Cricket had this commercial advertising their latest offer and comparing it to one of the big companies, Verizon.

Their offer was completely compelling and if you know anything about Mark Joyner they had the Irresistible Offer going.

Their plan was $39.99/mo and it offered you:

*unlimited talk time both during the normal workdays
*unlimited talking on nights and weekends.
*This is good for any number, cell phones or landlines with any provider, there were no long-distance charges.
*Unlimited text and picture text
*Mexico texting
*caller ID, call waiting, three-way calling, and voicemail

And I believe the Verizon plan was the same $40 per month but you only got 1000 anytime minutes and you are limited to just a few hundred texts per month before you had to start paying an additional fee for each text that you send.

I haven’t done much comparison in the cell phone market because I don’t have a cell phone and have no real desire to get one. But just judging by these things cricket definitely had an irresistible offer that was far, far superior to Verizon.

I have one big problem with the commercial though. I don’t know how it happened but they got the right marketing tactic by putting a deadline on the commercial and saying the offer was over on September 30, 2009.

Unfortunately for them, the commercial was being shown on October 1, 2009. Deadlines are great but this is just a reminder that you want to doublecheck your marketing materials before sending them out. And with the high cost of TV I thought it was extremely unusual to see this because I had never seen anything like this before.

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Leave me your comments on other interesting gaffes or mistakes that you’ve seen in people’s marketing. Or even comment if you saw a piece of exceptional marketing so I can take a look at it and we can all learn something from it.

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