A while ago I hired a personal trainer. His name’s John and he’s brilliant. Whilst I feel great *after* the gym sessions, *during* is often complicated by my muscles not working after being destroyed by exercise after exercise.
One of the things that keeps me going — or, keeps my mind of the ‘shit, shit I can’t feel my arms’ feelings that drift around my head during exercise — is the conversation. John’s a good talker. We chat about a load of things and often about mobile phones. There I am, knocking back 20 minutes on the crosstrainer whilst firing questions to John about his Orange account and his day to day mobile usage.
The other day John asked me what that question-service I was talking about a few weeks ago was called.
“Texperts,” I think, “They just rebranded from 82ASK,” I prompted. (I’d told him about the rebranding excitement whizzing round London with the Texperts team.)
“Ah, no, it wasn’t them… who was it…” John said, deep in thought — but still, luckily, counting my reps. I can’t think when I’m in the middle of exercise pain.
“AQA?” I prompted.
“That’s right! Boy we were having a wicked time with them the other night,” John said, his face lighting up with good humour. He went on to explain that he and his friends had been in the pub texting stupid questions to AQA for most of the evening.
“What kind of questions?” I asked.
“Oh, stuff like, ‘Who’s the best looking out of me, Jess and Keith?’ — they wrote back with something like ‘Both you and Keith are nice, but Jess wins,’ it was brilliant.”
“How much is it per text?” I prompted. I think it’s a quid a text.
“Oh, I dunno, we didn’t really look,” John replied.
A quick visit to AQA’s website shows it is indeed £1 per text. I’ll need to tell John.
He and his friends spent a lot of the evening simply asking AQA silly questions — and they loved it. Fascinating!
More interestingly, I asked John how he’d come across them.
“Tube ads,” he explained, “I love their tube ad as it has tons of text on it to read… that’s how I found out about them.”
Advertising works, eh?
Everyone knocks long copy adverts these days, they (creatives and clients) just want image, headline, logo ads – but it shows that if you’ve got someone’s attention for long enough, long copy ads will be read and are effective (eg: ads across the tracks at tube stations, ads above the heads in the tube carriages) – people are bored and have nothing to do but read your advert – just don’t set the type in 7pt!