I was listening to a pop culture podcast (Appointment TV) and the host talked about how she cries at long-distance commercials during “that time of the month”. The funny thing is, she is younger than I am (around 30 I think) and I had assumed it had been many years since there were long-distance commercials on TV. But I’ve been a cord cutter for about 10 years now so I actually don’t know what commercials are on TV any more.
I honestly didn’t think they were even a thing anymore. Been years since I saw a commercial that was specifically for long distance service.
The last ones I remember were for those 1-800 long distance services and it’s been years since I’ve seen one of those.
Yeah, I’m just surprised a Millennial would even have that in her mind as a trope.
Without long distance, how do phone companies make money these days?
For AT&T, cell phones and other wireless services, satellite TV (they own DirecTV) and high-speed data services. I heard that the CEO of AT&T said he wants to get out of the landline business. They already sold this business in Connecticut (where the local landline company had been independent of Ma Bell for over a century before being bought by AT&T maybe twenty years ago or so).
Remember when those 10-10- and other collect-calling number commercials were as predominant on TV as Viagra and Cialis are now?
I forgot about those. They presumably didn’t have those other backup businesses to fall back on.
What commercials today present sentimental scenes of family life with no real pitch for a product?
Today, ET really would be lost! 
1800 collect … I remember they started the "bring back last decades celebrities for comedy relief "
But VOIP (dialpad! ::shudders:
through the cable company and cell phones brought long distance to an end and ended up slowly killing landlines …
in fact one of those phone companies that used to be marginally existing on slamming and cold calls just bought what was left of Verizon’s land line service in ca …
This was probably the last ad I recall seeing:
yeah, getting a LONG DISTANCE call used to be a big deal when I was a kid. I remember when we'd get our annual phone call from Aunt Iris. Mom would put both my brother and I on the phone.....for about 5 seconds. Just long enough to say "hi" and pass the phone off to someone else. Them was expensive calls don't you know. Heck, whenever grandma and grandpa drove down to visit us and returned from the hour long drive back to their house they used to leave a 'signal call' when they arrived home where they would hang up after one ring just so we'd know they made it back safely and not have to pay for a long distance call. Yes, I guess I came from pretty frugal stock as I have not heard of others engaging in this practice.As parodied in this SNL “commercial”
Nitpick, but what those guys were selling was not collect-calling service but long-distance service from someone other Ma Bell. (One of the biggest 10-10 services was owned by MCI. Remember them?)
For those unfamiliar with the concepts, collect calling means the person you are calling pays for the call, while with normal long-distance service, the person originating the call pays.
What I used in the 1990s was prepaid calling cards. My parents could get prepaid long-distance card from Costco or someplace similar so that we could call long distance domestically for about a penny a minute. (Typically, a card was good for 1000 minutes.)
In fact, only a few years ago, my mother found a stack of unused prepaid cards somewhere in the house, and tried to return them to Costco. (They actually accepted the return, but only at fifty cents on the dollar.)
Wow! Impressive by Costco.
I don’t remember the AT&T ad you linked to, but that was kind of interesting. The ones I remember were more recent (1990s at least) and actually pretty different, as they did not show anyone using the phone. In fact, I didn’t think they had any dialogue at all. It would just be a montage of scenes of families and couples, often outside against backdrops of fall colors or whatnot, and high production values. Basically short films designed to evoke sentimental feelings, without any dialogue or plot.
I also came from frugal stock on the maternal side, and my mom had some kind of scam involving person to person collect calls, using a fake name, to convey free messages. Pretty shady…LOL
That kind of thing was very common. The sitcom The Goldbergs, set in “ninety-eighty-something” even referenced it in a recent episode.
My mom’s scam, you mean?
As a part of my job I had to explain the concept of that to someone who was in their 20s and it was like I was speaking another language.
LOL! Now you have got me curious. How would that factor into your job?
The one you linked – I remember it well – was from 1999.
Around the same time, actor Sam Neill was doing ads for WorldCom (remember them?). I can’t recall if those WorldCom spots were strictly for long distance or if they were for what *then *would have then been more forward-facing services. If the former, those commercials would’ve been pretty much the last traditional long-distance service commercials.
Huh. None of these seem like what I remember. Did I imagine these gauzy, abstract spots with no dialogue?