MEDIA & MARKETING:Vodafone's call to 'show Eircom the door' provokes a retaliation, writes SIOBHÁN O'CONNELL

IS IT a good idea for a company to reference its rival’s advertising in its own advertising?

A recent campaign by Vodafone for its fixed-line service asked consumers to “show Eircom the door”. It is the first time Vodafone has mentioned Eircom in its advertising since it entered the fixed-line market last year and the move has prompted a swift retaliation from Eircom and plenty of comment within the advertising industry.

The Vodafone commercial, Red Door, showed people going about their business while the doors of their homes changed to red, the colour of the Vodafone brand.

It extolled the virtues of Vodafone’s landline and fixed broadband bundle. The conclusion of the advertisement showed a line of red front doors on a street in Ringsend in Dublin.

Eircom’s response was to hot- foot it down to the same location – Doris Street – and repaint the doors orange, Eircom’s corporate colour. The retaliatory Eircom commercial, Strippers, dreamt up by advertising agency Chemistry, showed a woman scraping away the red paint from her front door to reveal the original orange colour. Everyone else on the street was doing the same, with the message in the commercial being that 56,000 residential and business accounts had moved back to Eircom in the past year.

Chemistry filmed the stripping and repainting of two doors on the street, with the rest repainted in digital post-production.

Residents of Doris Street didn’t seem to mind: they received fees from both telecoms firms.

Vodafone consumer director Carolan Lennon says her company never references a rival in advertising for mobile services because Vodafone is market leader, but she says referencing Eircom in its Red Door advertisement was justified because Vodafone is a challenger brand in fixed line.

Eircom consumer director Debbie Byrne says: “When it [the agency] gave us the idea of Strippers, we sanctioned it immediately. The agency filmed the ad on a Wednesday and had it on air by the Friday.”

While the marketing teams in Vodafone and Eircom are clapping themselves on the back, the reaction from advertising professionals is mixed.

A contributor on Creative Ireland, one of the most popular online forums for advertising agency executives, observed: “In one smart move, Eircom has totally shot the Vodafone ad out of the water.”

However, another forum member commented: “I saw the Eircom TV spot and at no point did I make the Vodafone link. Instead, I saw a telecoms provider telling me that the company who provides my landline basically own my house. If a company tells me that thousands of old customers are coming back, all I hear is that they were so woeful that they managed to lose thousands of customers.”

Another contributor carped: “A brand should be much more self- confident than that. Eircom bosses need to give their marketing department and agency a dressing down. They’d be much more professional and effective if they came back with the sucker-punch of a superior campaign rather than a copycat one. It smacks of people with zero ideas.”

Eircom insists its €450,000 splurge on Strippers proved effective in securing more win-backs. The firm is now led by chief executive Paul Donovan, who previously had the same role in Vodafone Ireland. Donovan is wise to his former employer’s strategy and he’s obviously not going to take it lying down.