Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Moscow Carrier Uses Humor, Marijuana to Attract Youth Market

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 13:19:34 -0400

Moscow Carrier Uses Humor, Marijuana to Attract Youth Market Wireless service
competition is fierce in Moscow, especially for non-GSM network carriers. Sonet, a
CDMA network operator, is using humor in an offbeat advertising campaign that is
definitely not for the irony impaired. Sonet's target is the youth market. The
current campaign employs 50 billboards and two electronic screens in Moscow as
well as Internet banner ads that have a large Marijuana plant and a psychedelic
$80 price tag to attract potential users.
===============================================================

Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2003. Page 5
Operator Uses Marijuana to Lure Clients
By Simon Ostrovsky
Staff Writer
The decreasing popularity of
non-GSM cellular standards has
forced alternative operators to think
up some unusual ways of tapping the
otherwise booming market.
Moscow CDMA operator Sonet, for
example, is hoping that an illegal
psychotropic plant will help
popularize its service with the youth
segment, posting giant marijuana
leaves on billboards throughout the
city as part of a new advertising
campaign.

In the ad, Sonet solicits clients to sample its "new bouquet," and uses a play on
the Russian word plan, which means both plan and dope in English, to entice
clients to use its vneplanovy, or unexpected, unlimited tariff plan.  Over a
background of green marijuana leaves is a psychedelic-looking $80 price tag that
potential abusers -- that is, users -- will have to pay for the new service.  The
campaign is aimed at potential clients "who have a sense of humor, whose thinking
doesn't fit the status quo and who have a vivid imagination," the company's
commercial director, Anastasia Markovich, said by e-mail.  It is not meant to
promote the use of drugs, she added.  In its bid to attract more customers to its
80,000-strong subscriber base, Sonet has used a string of creative advertisements,
including a flashback to Soviet times with its "Freedom of Speech" campaign, which
puts Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara back on Moscow's streets. And on
television, Sonet is running a spot that shows a young woman talking on the phone
so much that she doesn't notice her bathtub overflow, as an angry neighbor below
gets wet.
The current ad campaign has 50 billboards and two electronic screens touting the
contraband cannabis in the capital. Sonet is also pushing its plan with Internet
banner ads, and the company may try to score new clients with a weed-themed
television commercial, Markovich said.

Sonet is not alone in using foliage to promote phones.  GSM operator Megafon
recently announced it would plant lifelike palm trees that double as base stations
in and around the city, starting this month.  For Sonet and rival MCC, Moscow's
market is growing increasingly tough because the subscriber bases of big GSM
operators have sprouted into the millions.  One of the biggest advantages the GSM
standard has over its competitors, such as NMT and AMPS, is roaming, which allows
users to talk on their phone in almost any city, Renaissance Capital's telecom
analyst Olga Zhilinskaya said.  Another GSM advantage is text messaging -- not
widely available with the other standards.

Nevertheless, NMT networks are attractive in that they are relatively cheap to
upgrade to the third-generation CDMA standard, as is the case with Sonet, which
started up as an NMT operator.
However, Zhilinskaya said the company has taken the wrong marketing approach in
using the sophisticated technology. It promotes predominantly voiced-based
services to appeal to the mass market.

"There's no point in competing with the GSM giants," she said,
"They should focus on mobile Internet services and aim at a smaller segment of the
market."
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2003/10/14/043.html

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