It is an advertiser's dream to firmly link their product to a positive experience. A shining example of this is Corona's tie to lounging on a Mexican beach. Corona branding is so effective it transcends our awareness that we have been hooked by ad men (at least it did for my roommates and me last summer when we sat on a porch overlooking and industrial park, drinking Coronas and imagining beach life). But of course there are other examples of advertisers striving to fuse their product with an image and falling short. Seth Stevenson at Slate recently described a questionable attempt to redefine Amstel and today I came across an item on the New York Times website that lead me to the following US Cellular commercial:
You don't have to dig deeply to find some problems with this commercial. It is difficult to imagine a stranger walking in public with a cell phone to his ear bringing a smile to anyone's face. In fact I have trouble imagining this has ever happened. If it has, the smile was undoubtedly not a function of the cell phone use, instead perhaps the chatter's bad hair cut or poor grooming, etc. Hence the curiosity that is the commercial above. The positive experience these US Cellular advertisers are trying to associate with their product is not only unconvincing, it is the polar opposite of the everyday reality of urban cell phone use.
Watching this commercial I find myself wondering if the person who devised it has ever walked past a cell phone user in a crowded urban area. The disconnect between the real life experience portrayed and what occurs in the commercial is amazing. If this commercial accomplishes anything, it draws attention to something we all hate about cell phones.
The commercial is trying to capture the moment when two total strangers exchange a smile. Who has never had their day brightened for a second by a smile from a stranger? (Maybe someone who has lived their entire life in New York City?) Yet the commercial completely misses on what makes such an interaction meaningful. If you smile at someone or someone smiles at you, you are sharing something, even if it is an exceedingly small something. If someone chatting on a cell phone smiles, that person is not exchanging a smile with the people nearby. The cell phone smile is extended to the person on the other end of the call. That smile might as well be a scowl to random bystanders because they are always going to be on the outside of the interpersonal exchange.
With that in mind I propose an alternative commercial to US Cellular. In my commercial there is a jerk walking around, chatting loudly on his iphone (after all, you know an iphone user is an AT & T subscriber) and a group of US Cellular customers rally together to teach him some manners and get him to go have his discussion in something closer to privacy, while standing (or sitting) in one place. I think this commercial would have a real populist appeal.
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Or maybe you missed the point of commercials in general, which is, not to show reality as everybody sees it but, on the contrary, to show a different and often unexpected reality supposedly made possible by the product advertised.
The idea here is to break with the common image of the stressed-out city dweller by telling the potential US Cellular customer there's no difference between phone and face-to-face interactions and, after all, a smile will always be communicative.
Definitely debatable, maybe a bit too far from reality and obviously not very convincing, but at least more appealing than a jerk being rude at people he passes in the street, don't you think?
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