Orange makes me go a bit puce. (Again.)

I know I keep going on and on and on about Orange, but it is the brand that consistently upsets me the most.

The tone of voice is consistent, I'll give it that. But it's so consistently unctuous and supercilious and syrupy that I just want to gag.

Coming home from a meeting last week, I spotted the latest sticky-sweet globule to have dripped from Orange's honeyed spoon. It was this:



It turns out to be part of the new Orange campaign from Fallon, based around this line of 'I am who I am because of everyone.' There is, God help us, a TV version:




Christ. For my money, these ads prove that the easiest thing to do with this sort of quasi-lyrical, oh-so-meaningful copy is to get it horribly wrong.

Thankfully, I am not alone. Campaign swiftly named the commercial Turkey of the Week, and the opinions they recorded from punters in the street were generally of the 'boring', 'confusing' variety. One of these reviewers gets straight to the point, saying she thought it was going to be an ad for teaching, or 'something with a bit more meaning, rather than just a mobile phone company.'

And that's it, isn't it? Orange appears to have had enough of being 'just a mobile phone company'. (All right, a broadband company too, but that doesn't seem to be working out too well either).

You feel that somebody somewhere has said to them, 'You're not about boring old phones any more. You're a brand. An iconic brand. You're a totem, a cultural touchpoint, a glowing connection between all the peoples of the world. You're a fireplace for us to gather around as the night settles coldly all about. You help release the dreams in us all, as a fine summer rain unleashes the delicate majesty of the rainbow.' Or something.

It's all very well to recognise the 'softer' elements of a brand, of course. If you allow people to communicate, you become a facilitator for all sorts of things in life. Lovely. But what if that becomes all you talk about?

Well for one thing, you run the risk of going generic, which I think these ads do. They just become about connections between people, and that's something any telecomms company can talk about.

But all this earnest, onanistic froth also seems hopelessly out of joint with the bloke who convinced me to sign an 18-month contract in order to get a free, early upgrade to a phone that's never worked properly since. And crap coverage.

Perhaps if customers came away from real-life encounters with Orange glowing with the sheer delight of it all, the brand would have more chance of getting away with such fluffy, pure 'brand' advertising. (It's impossible not to think of the iPod ads, which provide no more information than do the Orange ads, but succeed by reflecting the - authentic - joyous simplicity of the product.)

Sadly, though, I think the rot goes even deeper. It's in the tone of voice itself. Like the lady said, all this earnest, high-falutin' stuff about 'who I am' suggests something with 'more meaning', 'rather than just a mobile phone company'. Basically, they've got a bit above themselves. (Or more crudely, up themselves.)

The thing is, there's nothing wrong with being 'just a mobile phone company'. Provide a great service, communicate it with sense and charm, and you're onto a winner. We all love our mobiles (as long as they work). We couldn't be without them. They let us do all sorts of things.

So why is Orange so determined to pretend it's something else? I still wonder if they've got all sorts of new service offerings up their sleeve, and want to create a more abstract umbrella brand that can encompass whatever those are. Maybe. But if so, it ain't working.

Now Orange has made a Sony ad.

There's a thread developing here, isn't there? I've been noting TV ad rip-offs for a while now (here and here), and now there's another one. We've just had BMW doing Honda, now Orange do Sony. When the ad below began on my TV the other night, I thought, 'Here we go: Bravia again.' But it wasn't.



It was Orange, whose marketing continues to get up my nose in all sorts of ways. Not only are they persisting with their wilfully bewildering dolphin/badger/artichoke/frog tariff system (or whatever it is), they've made a Sony ad about it. I mean, it's not quite on the same scale, but don't all these people reaching up for floaty orange things remind you just a weeny bit of all those people reaching up for floaty foamy things?


Presumably the international market has something to do with this. The ad was shot in Buenos Aires, but it could just as well be Paddington or Grand Central. And there's no dialogue. So you can stick whatever voiceover and titles you like on it. Bingo: globally consistent branding, plus lower production costs.

Both spots, of course, are made by Agency Du Jour, Fallon. They're making it pretty easy on themselves these days, aren't they? They must still be laughing even when they've been back from the bank for some considerable time.

A virulent infection in adland?

The latest VW and Audi ads seem to be evidence of a virus infecting the advertising world. The disease leads agencies and their clients to believe that they must make ads with lots of people busily building something related to their brand, in some suitably inventive way. Except they're all looking distinctly uninventive now.

The latest from VW:


The latest from Audi:


From Honda:


From Guinness:


From Orange (complete with hideously patronising oh-so-friendly Scots voiceover):


From Skoda:


I suppose it all started with Cog:


But why must a wheel, once invented (or at least ripped off), be reinvented so many times, for so many different brands? How lazy can you be?

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Update (3/4/08): I've just seen Johnson Banks' post on the same subject. Great minds, and all that - I promise I wasn't copying.

Orange heresy

Lots of people (Scamp, Ben, and others) clearly love Poke's new Orange website, Good Things Should Never End. 

I don't. I know I seem to have it in for Orange at the moment, but I just don't like this thing.

I mean, it's all right. (Although it took the devil's own time loading up on my new MacBook Pro.) The illustrations are nice, the music's good... but so what? Little funky/trendy animations that go on forever but don't do much. The odd sales message from Orange. Ooh. Wow.

I got interested when a sort of soft telly called Buzz tried to speak to me, but he couldn't hold a conversation. Try throwing him the mildest curveball and he suffers a sort of e-stroke.

You can steal the little animations and put them in your own site or blog, like this:



Which is nice and easy to do but suddenly I'm advertising Orange on my blog. Do I want to? No. (Although enough people will fall for this to make it well worth the effort.)

I know I'm wrong. I know thousands of snazzy online-y people love all this stuff. It's brand engagement, it's interactive, it's viral, it's all those wonderful things that keep the kids sitting on their ever-expanding arses instead of climbing trees. But I just got bored. Fast. 

(Scamp claims this site will engage you for half an hour. If it does, you need a bit more going on in your life. Watch an episode of Frasier, for heaven's sake. Or amaze yourself for real with a couple of the talks on TED. Or read a damn book.)