AS A marketing wheeze, it is hardly original. Park a logo-covered car at the top of Grafton Street, surround it with a bevy of bikini-clad models, open the sunroof and hand tenners to bemused passers-by.

If Sean Bolger, the founder of Imagine, is to succeed in his ambition to position the company’s €9.99 broadband offering as budget-conscious Ireland’s package of choice, he will need to use a lot more imagination, given that there are about 40 competitors with similar products.

“It was the kind of stunt that smacked of the worst excesses of the dotcom era and tickled the hairs on the back of my neck,” said one industry analyst. “It did nothing to convince people that broadband is serious and, anyway, this isn’t real broadband because it limits you to a set number of hours.”

Bolger believes it is time to take broadband marketing and pricing “out of the hands of the geeks”.

“The techies can argue about capacity all day, but the pay-as-you-go model effectively is for people who don’t feel like spending €40 a month to find out what broadband is all about,” he said.

Bolger says that not only did he get maximum bang for his buck, given the amount of media coverage he managed to generate, but he has managed to follow this through with a large increase in sign-ups for his service — no mean feat in a crowded market.

Despite an explosion in provider numbers, who are spending tens of millions of euros on advertising, even consumers who can get always-on internet have been reluctant to sign up.

Ireland has 175,000 broadband customers, the second-lowest penetration in the European Union. An EU study placed Ireland 19th out of 25 countries for broadband take-up, behind countries such as Latvia, Slovenia and Estonia.

Marketing experts say that if the service providers want to sell broadband to large numbers of consumers, they will have to convince them that it is a necessity for the home, not an expensive luxury. They should also stop using so much technical language.

“It’s all very easy to blame lack of infrastructure, but companies market it as a technology and people don’t buy technology, they buy solutions,” said Enda Kelly, an analyst with iReach, an IT research firm.

“Companies talk about meg downloads, etc, but people want products, not megs. If you sell bundles of XYZ products instead of XYZ technology, people will buy it.”

Broadband providers could probably do with taking a leaf out of the books of 3G mobile phone companies, which sell their products based on the content on offer rather than the capability of the handsets. However, marketing experts argue the “content is king” argument is relevant only where there is high market penetration.

The long-running spats with Eircom over network access have failed to discourage companies from spending lavishly on advertising campaigns, but the returns have been poor in terms of market growth.