Life Is For Sharing: The T-Mobile Way

I love the new T-Mobile campaign.

There's a very cool blog post on it, with videos of the campaign and everything, at http://www.garethkay.com/.

Here, again, appears the theme of bringing people together through inspirational advertising. While Visa does it with encouraging people to "Go" places, T-Mobile is taking a different approach: bringing people together through doing common activities in public places. On the link to the blog above, you have thousands of people gathered together in Trafalgar Square singing "Hey Jude" by the Beatles, arms around each other, gathered around microphones with people they have never met. In this ad, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUZrrbgCdYc, a handful of people in the middle of a subway station just stopped. And did nothing. For minutes.
And then they danced.
To the suprise and entertainment of all the passers-by, and even a brightening of several hundred days.

The best thing about this campaign is that it blends the nontraditional with the traditional. It takes events that normally would be construed as nontraditional, such as dancing in a subway station, brands them in that way, and then films it and airs it on TV, making it commercial and as such a common form of advertising. In planning their media this way, T-Mobile was able to not only promote their brand to those who were lucky enough to be in the station at the right time, but also the hundreds of thousands of other people around the country who happened to see the commercial when it aired.

It also has a different message than most of the other inspirational campaigns taking place now. Instead of trying to be inspiring or directly telling people that the only way to stimulate the economy is to go places and buy things, it simply promotes the fact that we can get through this together. Only by working with one another towards a common goal, whether that be a dance routine, a song, or a stimulus package, can we hope to dig ourselves out of the hole we're in.

In some ways, this message is even more effective because it plays off of the emotionality of people. Who doesn't love seeing thousands of people gathered together, singing a song that has been immortalized since the Beatles first sang it? Who isn't surprised and entertained to see a random group of people start dancing on their commutes to work?

T-Mobile (and Saatchi & Saatchi) have invented a truly great campaign. Let's learn from its message, and share it with each other.