AT “WHATEVER” COST
The Collect Call Campaign You Wish You Thought Of
The invention of cell phones changed telecommunications forever. If you look back in time to before their widespread popularity, you’d see a number of things that are either disappearing rapidly at this very minute or no longer exist at all. Pay phones, for example, were once everywhere—on street corners and outside businesses, waiting for you at rest stops along highways. Long-distance phone calls were also priced higher than local ones, and the longer the distance, the longer the per-minute fee.
Perhaps the biggest difference from days before the cell phone were “collect calls.” When calling “collect,” the caller wouldn’t pay; instead, the phone company would charge the person being called.
For most of the United States’ collect call history, business giant AT&T ruled the telecom roost. Not only was AT&T the nation’s largest long-distance provider by far—it was also a monopoly in most cases until regulators broke it up in 1982. As the easiest way to make a collect call was to dial zero for the operator, and AT&T was almost always the company for which the operator worked, AT&T became the go-to company when making a collect call. This persisted even after regulators stepped in; when those placing collect calls were asked to choose a long-distance company, the most common answer was “AT&T.”
But it wasn’t the only answer. Some collect callers were simply indifferent to who provided the long-distance service—the callers themselves weren’t footing the bill, after all. In a very honest moment, many of them would simply reply that they didn’t care or that it didn’t matter.
And to a small company in Texas, that answer proved profitable.
In 1996, People magazine shared the story of a Dallas-area company named KTNT Communications. KTNT was one of hundreds of Texas-based companies registered as a long-distance provider for collect calls. If you were a dialer who didn’t care which company connected your call, KTNT shouldn’t have been at the top of the list: For a three-minute Houston-to-Dallas call, AT&T charged just under $5; for the same call, KTNT charged $7.50. And yet, in many cases, the person you were calling ended up paying KTNT. Why? Because KTNT opened subsidiary companies named “I Don’t Know,” “It Doesn’t Matter,” “I Don’t Care,” and “Whatever.”
The operator wouldn’t just connect your call using these creatively named subsidiaries, however. KTNT president Dennis Dees told the Associated Press that the practice “was not deceptive at all,” as KTNT instructed local telephone companies to inform callers that they were being connected via a company with the same name as their response. The AP tested this claim and found that typically, the operator would verify unprompted that, yes, they wanted to use the company called “I Don’t Care” (or whichever company they accidentally chose). As a result, the scheme made KTNT quite a bit money—before the cell phone made collect calls virtually obsolete, at least.