How Unethical are Ringtone Subscriptions?

I sit here on a Sunday morning watching Channel 7, eating Breakfast & indulging in one of my favourite types of TV shows – “Australia’s deadliest Animals.”

However, Australian Sunday morning TV is notorious for the number of ad breaks, & who else would advertisers target at this time of the week than Children.

Every break for the past 60 minutes has contained 90% content related to Ringtone Offers. Now, Whilst I normally don’t have a problem with Ringtone subscriptions, these ads are clearly being very Deceptive:

Guess which animal is making this noise (you hear a lion roar in the background) text to this number & win $4000Which cup is the ball hiding under, text to this number & win $4000

Then written in tiny text at the bottom of the screen the terms & conditions (which only appears at the start & end of the ad), which happen to mention the subscription side of the bargin, which mind you, is still hard to read even on my HDTV.

Names of Companies doing this: Blinck & Maxitext & Let’s do the math:

Blinck: $4 per text x 6 text per week = $24/week or $1248 / year

Maxitext: 3 Text per week = $10/week or $520 / year

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid I certainly didn’t have access to that kind of cash & that (for me) is the major problem.

Kids are naturally the most susceptible to these kinds of offers because they tend to overlook the “fineprint” especially when the ads are on in between children’s cartoons & programs. And who ends up footing the bill?

This is one of the reasons why I have never felt comfortable promoting ringtones & ringtone subscriptions. I do agree that driving PPC traffic is much much less deceptive (depending on how it’s done), especially if you’re bidding on artists (i.e. Lil wayne Ringtones).

CBS News in America posted a story this week about about Ringing up Big Charges for “Free” Tones & we all know that Azoogleads recently got hit with a $1 Million Dollar lawsuit over “Free Tones.”

It seems however, that certain Australian advertisers are still allowed to advertise “Free Tones” even though they’re clearly not. The TV networks also don’t seem to care much about the deceptive ads.

What’s your views on Ringtone subscriptions, do you have a problem with promoting them & how do you feel about deceptive TV promotion?

Do you think that Ringtone Subscriptions are Unethical?