For advertising agencies space is the final frontier. But whereas the USS Enterprise explored it, ad creatives have proved more cautious, as the current O2 commercial underlines.
To come across as anything other than a close encounter of the naff kind, advertising requires the expensive, filmic strokes that television advertising is ill equipped to deliver.
With its vision of a utopian cosmos, and its painful corporate soundbites, the O2 ad, made by Cawley Nea TBWA and portentously called Reasons To Be, is an exercise in pseudo-spiritual vagueness that says conspicuously little about the product.
Presumably the intention is to convince consumers that they are buying into enlightened consciousness rather than phones.
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Opening promisingly on two suns rising over a planet, it doesn’t take long for the ad to reach the galaxy of ambient music and crystal balls, signifiers of a chilled-out new world of consumer empowerment.
“Imagine a world where loyalty is rewarded,” intones the voiceover, describing a place in which silhouetted hands clasp, echoing a recent AIB campaign. To paraphrase the title of a Troy McClure faux educational film from The Simpsons — mobile telephony and you: partners in freedom.
As deep as a glass of kabbala mineral water, the ad shuffles shiftily through its cod, new-age manoeuvres before abandoning all pretence of a higher purpose and shovelling out the money shot: a blizzard of what looks like cash blowing down on to a “world where your mobile network constantly comes up with good reasons to be with them”.
Its payoff is double-edged, possibly intentionally but probably not.
“Imagine a world that revolves round you.” Greed and narcissism dressed up as individual enlightenment. It’s life, but not quite as we know it.
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