134 calls since July 18? (And how many of those, I wonder, occurred in the last hour for which it's been on HN and accrued 81 points..)
So far I'd say it's probably not justifying it's cost/effort. I don't really understand why the Swedish one (which I understand to be the original) was made - but I understand clones even less. Is it just PR; does the tourism company behind it really think it will be effective?
I would say the Swedish number was an big success and very cost effective pr campaign compared to normal advertising. And that is why France trying to do the exact same thing.
It's not easy to get peoples attention in the media noise, but the Swedish number was something different and new an got viral globally.
Over 190.000 got so interested they actually interacted and called, many millions have read about it. People called from 186 different countries, so the campaign spread to almost every country in the world. People talked combined for more than one year.
To get such attention globally and so many to interact is really worth a lot, you could not have paid for that in normal ways you do pr.
By the way…
I guess the Swedish number also could have been inspired by one of the official swedish twitter accounts [1] that is curated by a new Swede every week [2]. It got alot of attention when released, so I think they got inspired on that idea. My guess tho.
As a telco you can actually take a profit from incoming calls. I am not sure if you are allowed to be the called party in this case though. I remember similar services here in Germany that regularly had to change numbers because they got blocked by the callees services provider too.
So far I'd say it's probably not justifying it's cost/effort. I don't really understand why the Swedish one (which I understand to be the original) was made - but I understand clones even less. Is it just PR; does the tourism company behind it really think it will be effective?