C&W vice-president of marketing, Grant Mercer

Cable and Wireless will today launch a new $100-million marketing campaign that the company says is designed to lure consumers to the 'Anyone Plan' call option that it launched in mid-September.

The plan offers discounts to subscribers depending on their calling pattern.

The details of the campaign will be made known at today's press launch at the company's corporate headquarters on Carlton Crescent in Kingston.

But last week Friday, the company's senior vice-president of marketing, Grant Mercer - who has been at the helm of the marketing department since mid-August - hinted that the new campaign "will offer consumers even bigger benefits".

"What we are going to announce (is an extension) of the 'Anyone plan'," Mercer told the Business Observer. "Not only will we have the lowest cross-network rate but we are also going to introduce new benefits."

Print, radio advertisements will begin running tomorrow while the television versions are expected to come on stream by the weekend..

In September, the company announced a 41 per cent cut in what it charged its mobile customers to call into other networks. It also raised the cost to C&W subscribers of calling into their own network.

Called the 'Anyone Plan', the option features a flat $10 per minute rate for inter and intra network calls between 7:00 am and 7:00 pm, C&W's peak calling hours. For off-peak periods, the rate is $8 a minute.

Up until the announcement in September, it cost Cable and Wireless' customers $17 a minute for calls into other mobile networks.

The plan was accompanied by an intense advertising campaign featuring a humourous and talkative taxi driver, Pressa, who gives an earful on every opportunity he gets about the benefits of the new plan he aptly labeled "ten-eight".

That campaign, Mercer noted, resulted in a big jump in sales.

"The response was fantastic we had a great life in sales," he said.

Mercer, however, declined to give details of the increase.
He said last week that 'Pressa' would continue to be the main feature of the new campaign, but this time he would share space with his family and friends.

"We want the people to know Pressa even better, he's got family and he's got friends," Mercer explained.

"We are going to have snippets of his life," he added. "We anticipate that Press will be around for a long time.

The campaign that is expected to run until Christmas is expected to help drive sales in a segment of the market that was taken over by C&W's main rival Digicel Jamaica shortly after it began offering service in Jamaica four years ago.

With over 1.3 million cellular subscribers, Digicel has nearly twice as many cellular customers as C&W.

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