Ad-monishing wireline replacement

It's the same every year. We write the wrong date on our checks a half-dozen times. We break half our resolutions before going to bed on New Year's Eve. We clear Figgie pudding from our arteries with one good morning of exercise and promise our livers they've seen the last of the New Years' glog. Then we settle on the couch with a tasteful Chablis and the last of the Christmas cookies and watch all the new programming on TV. And there we sit until Spring.

This year I, for one, am hoping for something different, something fun and exciting like--better commercials. Yes, when I am not looking out the window at the little old lady next door shoveling her driveway, I'd like to see the phone companies start taking on this whole "wireline replacement" thing in their advertising. It could be fun.

Have they not seen the dreadful customer satisfaction surveys on wireless service? Do they not know wireless service still sucks when users are not on a highway or in an airport or shopping mall? Don't they realize that the idea of an entire populace disconnecting their home phones in favor of wireless is absurd?

The only benefit to a landline connection is its unparalleled quality and dependability. Service providers should start exploiting that fact while they can--that is, while it's still true. Granted, they would be slamming their own sister service, but consumers are so confused right now that they'd hardly catch on to that. Besides, business users need to be reminded that while working from home their landline phone won't turn an order for 30 million fancy widgets into an order for 30 Brazilian dancing midgets.

I would like to see a commercial about some brash young graduate during a job interview where he gives only a cell phone number and an e-mail address for his contact information and the little thought cloud pops up over the interviewer showing a picture of the applicant living in his car. "We'll be in touch," she'd say.

I would like to see the "Can you here me now?" guy walk beneath a telephone line just as the lineman gives it a jiggle to knock off the ice. And I would like to hear his now infamous words cut short as an icicle pierces his throat. Too graphic? Maybe pelting him with snowballs would be enough, then you could see all the engineers on the other end of the test scrambling around tweaking and tuning their scopes in order to determine the source of the intermittent thuds. Their desk phone would ring and upon answering the lineman from atop his pole would ask, "Can you hear me now?"

The dependability shtick has worked for carriers for one hundred years. Why give up on a sure thing now? They should get busy, though; they only have until May when the reruns start.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@primediabusiness.com.