The Hall and Oates Hotline: Brilliant Marketing or Public Service?

Are you having a tough day? Do you love Hall & Oates? Call: 719-26-OATES. 

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Are you having a tough day? Do you love Hall & Oates? Call: 719-26-OATES. We're almost sure that the makeshift hotline is a viral marketing ploy from Spotify or some other music on demand service. But maybe, just maybe, it really is some zany Hall & Oates fan's way of spreading cheer from the buttery voices of band members Daryl Hall and John Oates, just in time for the holidays. We recommend calling and transcribed the instructions offered by the robotic female voice that will answer:

Welcome to Callin' Oates: Your Emergency Hall and Oates Hotline

To hear "One on One" press 1

To hear "Rich Girl" press 2

To hear "Maneater" press 3

To hear "Private Eyes" press 4

Update (3:47 p.m.): Thanks to the help of a reader and a Google search, the mystery is solved. Callin' Oates is very viral test of a new service powered by Twilio, a startup self-described as "simple, powerful, pay-as-you-go APIs for cloud communications." It's unclear if it was intended to be a marketing effort, but based on a new but very active Twitter account, @CallinOates, we're pretty sure it is.

If you don't have a phone, you can watch a YouTube video:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.