The Advert Calendar Of Advent: 6: Vodaphone
Snow machine. Check.
Mobile phone companies face a challenge these days when they advertise. Everyone already has a mobile phone (trust me, if I have, then everyone has). So what these adverts are trying to do is jostle with the other companies to poach the competitors. Whilst Orange does this using baffling adverts about anything but phones, Vodaphone is a little bit more direct. You like talking to you friends and family, well if they were all on Vodaphone you could do it for free. At Christmas.
The Christmas aspect of this advert is in many ways negligible. There’s the happy family on a funfair ride, wrapped in pastel scarves and sweating like pigs because clearly its a studio shoot. But what is significant is the music. What sounds like a Travelling Wilbury’s version of The Only Ones “Another Girl, Another Planet”. As it winsomely gets to the part where he “thinks he’s on another world with you” you realise that this advert wants you to think of this as another world. A happy, pastel coloured world where old new wave songs a muzaked up, you can have fun all the time and your family are always on the phone to you.
That really would be another planet. And that would be Christmas Hell.
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jeff w on December 6th, 2006
I am still mobile-free.
I did used to have shares in O² though. Until the compulsory buy-out.
Zarathustra Smith on December 7th, 2006
Another Girl Another Planet is a song about heroin. So presumably Vodaphone’s underlying message is that they are encouraging mobile “users” to become addicted to, and entirely dependent on, their antisocial produyct.
Zarathustra Smith on December 7th, 2006
I meant “product”, by the way.
FT's Tim on December 7th, 2006
That picture looks for all the world like Jenny Love Hewitt is just out of shot, encouraging this cheery group of her clients to go into the light.
FT's Pete Baran on December 7th, 2006
Another Girl Another Planet is clearly not about Heroin. It is about another girl on another planet.
Zarathustra Smith on December 7th, 2006
It’s an allegory. About heroin. Written by a junkie.
FT's Tim on December 7th, 2006
Whatever next? Some crazy will turn up here claiming that “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” is about drugs, or some foolishness.
reg sukrat on December 7th, 2006
in other news, “heroin” by the vetsies is an allegory — about meeting a different lady on a sub-stellar body not our own
yr pal lord sukrat, reg
FT's CarsmileSteve on December 7th, 2006
ooooh!!!! dorian’s mixtape in the graun tomorrow is SONGS ABOUT DRUQS, maybe we should do a top ten songs not about druqs in protest…
Marcello Carlin on December 7th, 2006
1. “Take It Away” by Paul McCartney (Tokyo Airport mix)