Here are fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, they of the heaving tits and tight corsets look, camping it up with their gold Motorola Razr V3i mobile. I’m not even sure if you can still buy one – their designer phone was launched earlier this year in a 1,000 run, worldwide, selling at the equivalent of £400 each.
This ad has been screaming its chavvy vulgarity in virtually every glossy mag and colour supplement, drawing my resentful eye.
I am now primed for being beaten about the head with a cricket bat for admitting that I’m coming round to liking it, although I wouldn’t go so far as buying this bling.
Yet that’s the point: with mobile phones being a saturated market, certainly in the UK, the only potential for growth lies in convincing us to ditch our otherwise OK handsets for something snazzier. This won’t be the first marriage between a consumer technology brand and fashion designers; there’s nothing in this ad that tells you about the quality of the phone, it’s all about style.
The ad is perfectly pitched to appeal to the young pikeys whose imagination has failed to inspire them. Their only form of self-expression is to collect something shiny and new and yet, like the magpies they imitate, their coarse voices are never employed to utter anything of interest.
And yet, like Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket, the phone's exclusivity makes it an impossible dream (unless they have a quiet word with old Mikey McPikey down the pub, who'll have some good quality fakes freshly imported from Taiwan, on sale down Peckham market at a tenner a throw, first-come first-served).
Even the txt-style name, Razr is perfect for a generation divorced from its own language.
So full marks for a piece of advertising that is compelling, simple, and desperately sad.
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather
There's an amusing little article on the BBC website in which the author declares war on branded goods. In a short while, everything he owns that is branded will be chucked onto a bonfire. It's the usual story of disillusionment with capitalist society, where the brainwashed plebs are seduced by brands' empty promises.
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