EE UK Helps Customers to Save Money by Watching Video Ads

Fancy saving money off your EE Mobile bill and donating to charity at the same time? Well now you can, but the catch is that you’ll need to watch a “short” video ad first and then answer 1-3 questions. By doing this, customers can receive a credit of “up to” 20 pence per video and a donation of 5% goes to charity.

The new feature stems from EE’s partnership with the charity focused WeAre8 app. According to the WeAre8 website, “we’ve flipped the system so that brands value and pay YOU 10-20p, as well as donate to charity, every time you watch their video ads.”

EE’s mobile customers will be able to sign-up to WeAre8 via “EE Up“, a new platform in their existing My EE app that offers exclusive experiences, rewards, competitions and benefits. Each time a customer engages with a branded video from EE, a donation will be made to Unicef.

At present, EE is the only UK mobile operator that will give you the option to save money off your monthly bill by using the app (Tesco Mobile did something similar back in 2016, but we’re not sure if they still do that). The idea is to help tackle global issues via millions of small actions.

Sharon Meadows, EE’s Director of Propositions, said:

“We wanted to reward our customers with the best range of flexible benefits, so we’ve launched EE Up in the My EE app. As well as the usual giveaways and competitions, we’re giving customers more by offering an easy way to give back to society. We’ve all had more time on our hands in recent months and in a matter of minutes per day, our customers can get money off their monthly bills and also give back to causes they care about through WeAre8.”

After customers sign-up, they will be sent a personal link and can then control the frequency and time of day they want to receive brand videos via SMS, Email, or both (minimum redemption from £1 and incoming funds take 30 days to become available). Following the initial launch, customers can expect to receive around 3 branded videos per week, with this number increasing to 1-2 per day as the platform evolves.

Personally, we’d prefer it if customers could just watch such videos when they wanted via the app, rather than having them pushed to their devices via email or SMS. The latter can already be plagued by SPAM, so making that situation any worse is not going to be terribly desirable.

Lest we forget that anybody with a capped data allowance will need to be mindful of how much these adverts consume (there’s no mention of the data charges being zero-rated for such ads). However, there will no doubt be those who see some advantage in suffering lots of adverts in order to help keep their bills down, while also aiding charity.

Finally, while those on EE’s domestic Pay Monthly and PAYG tariffs can use this service, their business customers cannot.