They want your attention

[Methuselah]

Spectrum provides services in forty-one states, says Google, so I presume that their TV advertising is national. Their TV ads here run every hour or two. They must be spending a fortune on ad time. The current ads are irritating to watch. They have a guy come and repeat the same words “Unlimited $29.99 and Next Line Free” over and over, loudly, while jumping around all over the place. They don’t have to worry about offending their current customer base, but it is hard to see how these ads draw in more customers. The ads can’t really be ignored. I’m wearing out the channel switch button on my TV remote.
The modern trend in advertising seems to be to get attention by irritating the future customer base. They use couples of unconventional gender or color combinations or other things that may jar many people and are irrelevant to what they are trying to sell. They just want to shock you into attention. I don’t mind these pairings so long as they don’t frighten horses, but I spend my time watching them trying to figure out why they are jarring me to get my attention rather than sell me something.

[BoSoxGal]

This is not a new technique in advertising, it goes back many decades because ad men are fully aware of basic human psychology- the brain dwells far more easily on the negative than on the positive. At one time this was a keen evolutionary adaptation that allowed us to outwit our predators often enough that we thrived and ate lots of fat and our brains got real big. Now we are all driven to chronic anxiety by doom scrolling and the annoying ear worms and eye pollution of Madison Avenue. Joy!

[Bicycle Bill]

They repeat and repeat their pitch line because that's all they've got.  They don't have their own network for cell service; they piggyback on towers belonging to the Big Three (Verizon. T-Mobile, and ATT).  And they don't offer all that many devices — certainly not as many as Verizon or T-Mobile does; remember, not everybody wants or needs the latest model of iPhone — and for the record, the "$29.99 for one line and the second line is FREE" assumes that you already own BOTH of the phones you intend to use, and that any contract you might have had to get them has been fully paid for and unlocked by your previous carrier so you can slide their SIM card into it.

And they don't have time to go into all the boiler-plate about how service might not be available in all areas, or how data speeds may slow down if your usage crosses a certain threshold, or how this offer is for new customers only and expires after XX months (current customers need not apply), or — as I alluded to above — that YOU have to provide the phone, and if you want to get one from them, the price goes up to cover the cost of the device.  Remember, TANSTAAFL ... or a free cell phone, for that matter.

It might also be interesting to read the fine print to see how much lines 3 through whatever (to cover the rest of your family) would cost on a per-line basis.  This price point they're promoting could very well be limited to a two-line plan, like T-Mobile's 60-Plus senior plan.

So that's why they constantly harp on the one and only selling point they have to work with.

-"BB"-

[ex-khobar Andy]

I use Spectrum for cable, internet and landline. Laziness as much as anything because I've tried most of them and they all have lousy customer service and make you talk to their AI bot who has problems with anything more than very basic queries such as billing records etc. That said, I very rarely see a TV outage - certainly less than I did with Direct TV and another company I have forgotten. But I very rarely watch cable these days and I'm gong to cancel all but basic cable.

Their constant calls to my landline asking me to switch to Spectrum did piss me off however although I haven't had one recently.

[Methuselah]

That's great info, BB. I'm going to send it on to my relatives. The people most likely to respond to the ads are Spectrum clients already, who aren't eligible for the offer. I wonder if Spectrum is interested in buying the Brooklyn Bridge from me?