I hear this thing on late night infomercials all the time: “If you call in the next 15 minutes, not only will we send you product XYZ, but we’ll send you gift ABC as well! Call now, operators are standing by!”
Are we really to believe that at three o’clock in the morning there are operators sitting somewhere with stopwatches who know exactly what time that commercial aired and when 15 minutes will be up?
I figure, there’s no telling when the commercial aired. You call, get the freebies, and say “Ha! That commercial aired 2 hours ago!” and they can say “Yes, but it played 10 minutes ago in Des Moines.”
Or something like that.
I don’t have a factual answer for this, but I would personally believe that any company spending their dollars on mass advertising in that fashion probably does want to know if their ad dollars are effective. It’d be along the same line as those bottle-cap play-to-win games, which have unique serial numbers, or radio ads that say “mention my name and get an extra 10% off!”
Best guess, they don’t care if you call within 15 minutes or 2 hours, but they don’t want you calling in 2 weeks when the ad is off the air. 15 minutes just encourages the viewer to make a snap decision without doing any research. And it’s not a lie, technically. They never actually say “if you don’t call within 15 minutes, you won’t get the prize,” do they?
The purpose of “call in the next 15 minutes” is to give the impression that there is a special offer in order to get the viewer to get up and call. Instead of thinking, “maybe I’ll buy that someday,” the viewer thinks, “I’d better call before the 15 minutes are up.” It supposedly increases response.
The people who make the ad have little control over when they are being run. They staff the phones 24/7 and give the “offer” – which is actually the standard deal – to anyone who asks.
It’s not fraud – they do come through on what they promise.
There’s a difference between saying “Call within 15 minutes and you’ll get this” and saying “You will get this only if you call within 15 minutes.”
Exactly. They never say you won’t get the deal if you call later. It’s just a way of applying psychological pressure. They know very well that if you don’t call RIGHT NOW, you’ll probably come to your senses and realize that you don’t really need a blender the size of a coffee cup.
on the rare occasion that I’ve ordered from that kind of ad, I order on line - and lo and behold the same bonus offer is available to me there. It’s just the advertiser’s way of generating customers. They are counting on people thinking this is a special one time only deal. Hah on them. I’ve ordered 3 days after seeing the ad for the forst time and got the special.
But in most cases, these products do have 24/7 call centers in operation