The Australian
20 October 2005
By Simon Canning
WESTPAC has jumped on board the rapidly growing vanity phone number bandwagon just months after the industry was opened to competition. Some predictions suggest the embryonic industry could grow to be worth $100 million a year.
The bank has signed a deal to link its brand to a dedicated number that will allow customers to simply dial 1300westpac rather than have to commit a number to memory.
The bank has done the deal with Jack Singleton and his Phone Name Marketing, which has been agitating on several fronts for the past six years to open up the vanity phone number market in Australia.
Singo the younger is president of the Australian Phone Word Association and has invested nearly $5 million to get the business started, including buying 2000 numbers. The signing of Westpac, his first significant client, is the culmination of a long-fought war with Telstra and government bureaucrats to allow trade in vanity numbers that began with the standardisation of telephone keypads in the mid-1990s.
Westpac head of brand and marketing Phil Gunter says the bank is trialling the number with home loan advertising, but even early results suggest the new number could be extended across the entire bank.
“We are seeking customer and staff feedback and at the moment both think it is a great way of advertising our number,'” Gunter says.
“I'm from the UK and have been keen to use these for a long time. We want to be early adopters.''
The use of vanity numbers in Australia remains limited, with companies such as Qantas, Subaru, Big Pond, Hayman Island and Roses Only among the first users.
Research in Canberra last year, which matched overseas findings, revealed that 89 per cent of people were aware of alphanumeric dialling. A split run of commercials on television and radio, one with a name and the other with just a number, found the vanity number produced an increase in calls of 190 per cent on TV and 450 per cent on radio.
“Calls to the phone number stopped as soon as the ads stopped,'' Singleton says. “Calls to the phone name kept coming for weeks after the ads stopped.''
In all, the Australian Communications Authority has released 10,000 numbers that could each command $1000 per month rental or more. Singleton has snared 2000 of them. Other operators include Telstra, 1300 Words and Alpha Phone Words.
In the US brokers have been buying names for up to $US100,000 ($134,000), then leasing them to companies. There has also been illegal auctioning of numbers on eBay.