Dialling 1300 Pizza Is On Its Way

It’s a land grab not unlike the scurry to secure domain names or mobile-phone spectrum during the dotcom years. It’s attracted the attention of mathematicians, entrepreneurs and corporate giants and could change the way companies market themselves.

It’s called phone names. The technology has been around since the 1940s, but was freed up by the Australian Communications Authority only last July. The result is that soon we may be dialling 1300pizza, taxi or flowers.

Jack Singleton, the son of Sydney ad man John, is one of the main players in this emerging industry, with only Telstra having bought more numbers.

He came across the concept in America, where phone names like 1800callcash (Western Union) and 1800Starbucks are well known, and has been lobbying the ACA to free up the numbers since 1998.

“There’s a very fine line between lobbying and pestering,” he says.

Singleton has spent $2 million during the land grab year, where some big prices were paid.

1300taxi sold for $1 million in September last year, while 1300blinds and 1300tickets each fetched more than $300,000.

Singleton has about 1000 names including 1300Wizard, Brisbane and Westpac, while Telstra has more than 4000 numbers.

A recent study by Singleton in Newcastle and Canberra found that radio ads using a phone name received five times more calls than those using a straight number, while TV ads showed a threefold increase.

But having spent seven years buying up numbers he’s not about to sell them off.

He will be charging clients a monthly rental fee, which is where it gets tricky.

Singleton reckons one of the main advantages of phone names is lowering the cost of each lead (number of phone calls) and so proposes to take a percentage of the saving. For example, if the cost of each lead dropped $10, he might take $1.

The ACA began auctioning the numbers last July, but working out the word each six-digit number spells is not easy - every one has as many as 4096 combinations.

This attracted the mathematicians who devised programs to spit out different word combinations and therefore work out the value of each number. But this didn’t cover many brand names or partial words and led to some phone names going undiscovered.

Singleton didn’t realise he owned 1300findgod, which is also the same as 1300dinein (only the first six digits count).

“Dinein was already taken so we suggested press 1 to order a pizza and 2 to find god, but they didn’t go for it,” he says.