the T-Mob

Originally posted on the Sense blog – thought I’d stick up my observations on the T-Mobile campaign here – If only for posterity's sake:

I'm all for brands collaborating and co-creating with real people – freeing their brand to be remixed and re-appropriated. Indeed the most progressive brands have already realised that their future equity / identity will forged through this collaboration. But either through design or ineptitude isn't what T-Mobile have achieved.

Granted modern day flash mobs can be pretty mindless things in themselves and bear little relation to aesthetic and political goals of the Situationist movement. But what really gets my goat is the way the advert rips off the aesthetic of user created content whilst completely failing to creatively engage with it.

Any halfwit adman / brand pimp / planner must recognise that building brand identity is no longer about arbitrarily slapping your logo on everything. But this is precisely the myopia demonstrated in this advert – wherein the brand is completely dislocated from the mob they've staged and the T-Mobile ident is just tacked onto the end of the film. This makes the T-Mobile brand seem utterly irrelevant, desperate and instantly forgettable.

I'm not debating that their hasn't been a positive response to the advert or that it won't achieve massive viral circulation - the fact that they haven't done anything interesting with the flash mobs idea wasn't a barrier to the initial impact of the ad.

But I'm doubtful about how something as generic as a train station full of people dancing to Justin Timberlake would translate into more handset sales or convince people to adopt T-Mobile as a service provider - simply because there's no connection with their brand beyond a slapped on ident.

Above all I think its a wasted opportunity that they couldn't have come up with a more ownable concept which differentiated their service or sparked off a more self-fuelling creative exchange.