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I confess to initial bafflement at Bell
Canada’s current commercials. I just didn’t get them. I couldn’t figure out
how they were conceived, what they were meant to convey, or who they were
aimed at.
Used to be Bell didn’t need to
advertise. Bell was all there was. “Bell Canada” and “telephone” were
synonymous. The only reason to advertise would have been to distinguish the
phone from other means of communication.
Then the long-distance business was
belatedly opened to competition. Bell figured it should get in the game.
That imperative increased as AT&T and Sprint Canada began poaching Bell
customers. But when Bell tried to distinguish itself from the new
competition, its efforts presented symptoms of monopoly hangover. About the
best it could offer as a message was “Come on — we’re the real phone
company, right? Why would you go anywhere else?”
That strategy reached its zenith with
those “guess-how-many-people switched-back-to-us” spots. That campaign, in
turn, reached its nadir with the ad featuring the post-collegiate freebooter
cell-phoning grandpa from the beach at Dieppe to say thanks. I’m cynical,
but I know I’m not the only person who expected that commercial to end with
a comparison between the number of people who switched back to Bell and the
number of Canadian soldiers killed on that beach.
Bell used to have its advertising
spread among a selection of agencies. But as competition has intensified and
the number of phone-related products has multiplied, it’s consolidated those
disparate efforts in one account at Cossette Communication-Marketing. The
first branding campaign under that arrangement has given us the baffling
spots we’re puzzling over now.
Initially, I figured the enigmatic
quality was deliberate. All kinds of advertisers start a campaign with too
little information in order to intrigue us and ensure our continuing to
follow the next chapter hoping for some kind of explanation. I thought that
was what the initial spot with the two Bell bozos and the Italian guy was
aiming for. (“Two guys see a helicopter hovering; one says to the other,
‘Must be out of gas.’ “)
Bad joke, minimal connection to the
product, purpose obscure and really unattractive in terms of palette,
shooting, art direction and casting. Turns out that was the high point of
the campaign. Since then, things have just gotten dorkier, increasingly
inane and more annoying. Next came the “twisted pair” standing around
pointlessly in an absent family’s kitchen. (There’s a use for the phone: two
morons have broken into your house while you’re at work to orally abuse your
condiments. Call 911 and have them arrested.) All the crapulence of the
initial spot seemed to have been cranked up, and the writing and acting were
even stupider.
What was Bell thinking? What was
Cossette trying to achieve? It seemed as though this whole campaign was an
elaborate revenge scheme on Cossette’s part. Like George Metesky, who blew
up New York City mailboxes because Consolidated Edison screwed up his
electrical bill, Cossette seemed to be working to lash out over some slight,
as though it was trying to pay back Bell for some sin it wasn’t even aware
it had committed.
But that was too easy a diagnosis, and
it required too much unlikely orchestrated conspiracy nuttiness to be
applicable or make any sense.
Instead, deeper analysis indicates this
whole campaign is an admission that Bell, like its perpetually adolescent
spokesdoofuses, is totally clueless. The two guys in the commercials
represent a common stage in many people’s development. They’re out of
college, they’ve got some book-learning, but they’re still devoid of any
kind of common sense or street smarts. They can interact in a high school
cafeteria, but put them with adults in the real world and they’re
frightened, lost and hopeless. The only way they can view grown-ups is with
a kind of anxious bemusement. As a result, their disaffected pose is a way
of acting out their anxieties.
Acting out is the only way they can say
what they feel: “Mom, Dad — I know I should be more adequately prepared to
take my place among the adults. But I have no idea how to do that. Look at
the way I’m dressed, for Chrissake. I look like an overgrown eight-year-old
with a three-day wino-trim beard. Help!”
And there’s Bell’s whimpered cri de
coeur in those Cossette spots. Just like the spoiled post-teens, they want
independence. They can recognize it, but they can’t achieve or sustain it.
Having a monopoly is a lot like being a kid. You figure that big customer
base or your parents will always take care of you. Neither one will, of
course. Seen as an admission of its terror at the prospect of having to grow
up, these otherwise godawful commercials are awkwardly, oddly pathetic.
Almost touching. |
