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.