Barbara Lippert's Critique

Can you hear me now? We're so bombarded by ads for all types of phone and wireless companies—announcing more features, better services or their latest oddly spelled brand names—that we now have what amounts to a deafening wall of sound. The endless promotion of free minutes/no roaming/text messaging has become as annoying as those red-faced screamers who never get off their damn cell phones themselves.As part of this titanic phone-selling culture, Jamie Lee Curtis' Voice Stream commercials were never my favorites, but she brought a certain sass to even the lamest situations and managed to retain her dignity throughout, never getting full-Carrot Top on us. Then it was announced that after four years of spokes-crispness, Jamie, the American scream queen, was getting disconnected.Acquired by the giant Deutsche Telekom last year, VoiceStream is being re branded as T-Mobile. The target audience is now youth-enized (18-34, not 18-49) and more glo bal (the phone works in 80 countries). So the new Dona T-Mobile is younger (32 vs. Jamie's ancient 43), more sassy and darn intercontinental. And if you're going global, who could possibly do better in that arena than a Welsh woman who pretends she's Spanish: Catherine Zeta Jones?OK, I'm bitter about the age thing. I have yet to get over Lancôme's replacement of Isabella Rossellini, and now this! Suddenly, Jamie Lee seems like a beacon of greatness. But I have to give Z her props. She really shines—she looks fab and her voice is rich. (Jamie's plain-spoken-American spots will lame-duck their way through year-end as the new ads slowly "transition" to the 45 of 50 U.S. markets the company serves.) Directed by Tarsem (he of The Cell fame), the dazzling new T-Mobile spots look enchanting and blow right off the screen—but they never really make clear what T-Mobile's capabilities are. In the case of the big 60-second intro spot, "Anthem," the intriguing visuals are key, given that the rest of the spot consists of little more than the client's brief, repeated over and over. "More minutes, more features, more service," Z says, "more asking, more getting." The images, however, have depth and texture—and giant rolling doughnuts. The more-more-more idea is cleverly visually replicated with, for example, people multiplying like pop art into Brady Bunch-like boxes. It ends with, "Get more from life." Does that mean we should get an mLife? Are the doughnuts included?Three 30-second spots tell individual stories. Z's role is something like Roma Downey's on Touched by an Angel. Call it "Touched by a Zeta." Euro hipsters are going about their business, encountering problems, until our Cath erine enters the scene, shouts "Stop!" and, by freezing the action and inserting a T-Mobile phone into the scenario, makes everything better. It's a forced device that would be hard to pull off without Tarsem's enchanted storybook look and Ms. Jones' charismatic presence."Czech," ostensibly set in Prague, is the strongest of the three 30-second spots because it comes out of some sort of reality (Prague was a slacker capital in the early '90s). Your basic American X-er guy is shown with a Paulina Poriz kova type. She asks, "You stay and we go to Venice?" He says he can't, he has a dog back home. "Stop, stop, stop," says Jones in a female-Sean Connery-type accent. "Is he kidding?" She gives him a phone to call his friend back home, who agrees to keep the dog another week.The two other spots promote free minutes. A gorgeous Italian guy orders a cappuccino in a coffee bar, and a young British woman sitting nearby suddenly wants to learn how to say, "Now be a good boy and come sit on Mama's lap." Z supplies a phone to call the Italian Institute of Chicago, which says the lesson will take a while. A third spot, the weakest, shows a bored guy in a post office. Our Zeta angel freezes the moment and gives him a phone so he can "watch" a kung fu movie with his friend, à la "Whassup." The campaign offers high-octane visuals and has a star in its new spokeswoman. The spots really do have a different, European feel and more punch. But is T-Mobile a phone and a service? We don't find out. And while aiming at Gen X-ers is an interesting idea, low-energy slackers like the post office guy aren't exactly the kind of hard-driving businessmen who rely on having the same phone and number when traveling. And the upgrade-business types would probably be even happier to have Catherine Z transform their phone lives.

Brand Marketing

Barbara Lippert's Critique

Barbara Lippert

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Barbara Lippert