Many commercials encourage the viewer to call a phone number and stress that there’s ‘absolutely no obligation’. Direct mailings often include this phrase also. It’s usually for relatively expensive products, such as insurance and the products that don’t show the price. (Bowflex and Ultramatic beds come to mind – BTW, does anyone know how much those cost?)
So, why do the advertisers include this phrase? It seems obvious that you wouldn’t be required to purchase a product if you called a phone number or visited a website. Is ‘no obligation’ a vestige of a time when there *was *some sort of obligation? (Ultramatic commercials stress ‘no obligation’ unusually strongly, so I thought maybe older people, to whom the product is primarily marketed, might recall a time when calling a company somehow obligated them to buy something, and thus hesitate to call.) Is including the phrase a legal requirement, or is it just a way to encourage people to call and listen to a high-pressure sales pitch for a very expensive product?
Another commercial question – direct marketing ads and infomercials sometimes have a clock at the end, or say ‘call within the next 30 minutes’. This might have been answered before, but do they really know when the commercials are aired? It seems impossible that they would, unless it’s somehow embedded in the ‘ask for operator 123’ code.
I always thought it just meant they wouldn’t pressure you into buying something. Also, for things like the Bowflex and the bed, where they actually send you the item to try in your home, it means you can return it.
I’ve never done TV commercials, but I have ran radio commercials, and they were always able to tell me when the commercials were scheduled to run. They may not have always ran at that exact time if the DJs were gabbing too long or what not, but it’d be close. So it is possible.
I’d bet, though, that they don’t actually pay any attention to that, considering for most things you’re calling into some sort of call center and the company is running ads all over the country at all times of the day. You’re probably always calling within 30 minutes of the commercial airing somewhere on some of those things.
These ads, because they put out a lot of them, usually run on a ROS basis, since that costs less. That means the station determines when they will run; the advertisers have no idea.
The time limit is a way to get consumers to go to the phones. Most people won’t rush to order from an ad, but if they think there’s a time limit, it gives a sense of urgency and gets more calls (at least, in theory).