Ringtone provider Jamster’s animated television commercial for Crazy Frog — the “beh-ding-ding-dingy” ringtone turned dance hit — was named on Tuesday as the most irritating ad in Britain in 2005.
Marketing magazine editor Craig Smith said the Crazy Frog advert’s irritation factor was caused by the frequency with which it was repeated during advert breaks.
Out of 1 000 people quizzed by the trade journal, 60% named the Jamster spot as the most irritating of the year — even if the Crazy Frog tune hit number-one in the British singles chart at the end of May.
“A look at the bottom-line profit figures for Jamster indicates that the strategy was a piece of genius,” said Smith, recalling that the ringtone was downloaded more than 11-million times by June alone.
“It goes to show that irritation through repetition can breed success.”
The nerdy noise — the subject of hundreds of complaints to Britain’s advertising watch dog this year — was initially conceived by a Swedish technology buff trying to mimic the sound of an Italian scooter.
Jamster, a wholly owned subsidiary of California-based VeriSign, is Europe’s leading internet portal for cellphone entertainment. – AFP