I worked for AT&T, late 1970s through sometime in the early 1990s (depending on where you want to place the marker). And I was a loyal customer, too. When less costly competing services came along, from MCI and Sprint, I never gave them a glance. I never considered buying a phone or answering machine that lacked the stylized bell logo (or later, the stripy globe). Even my first real home PC was an AT&T model.
In more recent years, the loyalty has faded. It’s pretty much just the brand name now which gets acquired by new corporate scalphunters. (For people I worked with back then who remain with the company, such as it is, working life must feel a little surreal.) My cell phone now comes from Finland. It operates on a cellular network belonging to one of those “inferior” competitors. I’ve moved on.
All of which is by way of saying (you were wondering, admit it): I don’t have any particular vested interest in recent AT&T cellular service ads on TV… except as a TV viewer.
And as a TV viewer, I’ve started to become obsessed with those ads. Those frigging ads…
The first one to trigger this obsession in me is called, apparently, the “Sweet Pea” ad. A father is going on a business trip, and his little daughter packs her stuffed-monkey toy in his briefcase. As the father travels here and there, using his AT&T phone he takes photos of the monkey in various amusing poses. For example, he holds up the monkey so that it seems to be climbing up the side of a skyscraper (hello, King Kong). And he then sends these photos (with his phone’s email feature) back to his wife and little girl.
Where the first little blip fired in my subconscious was at 7 seconds into this video:
See those skyscrapers in the skyline as the man’s cab drives by? What city is that?, I wondered. Where are there five buildings arranged just that way, from shortest to tallest?
(Hint: nowhere.)
And then I got to the 10-second mark: five stacks of newspapers alongside a newsstand… short stack to the left, then a little taller stack, and so on to a waist-high monster. (In a real city, that stack would have fallen — or been pushed — over way before the first one got whittled down to ankle height.)
And so it continued:
- At :13, the little girl and mother are in the car, receiving the most recent monkey photo (hmm, which brand of phone might that be?), out in a supermarket parking lot at the end of their grocery shopping. Five fresh baguettes, carefully arranged in a shopping back in — yes! — shortest to tallest order.
- At :16, another (or the same?) five skyscrapers from :07, seen close up.
- At :20 seconds, five sets of increasingly tall (gulp) monkey bars on a playground.
And so on. And so on.
But still, it hadn’t really sunk in. Then came “Backpackers,” the one-minute version:
I got through this whole commercial without making any sort of connection to the “Sweet Pea” ad… until I hit that last shot, of the lovers at the water’s edge — in the background, rising from the sea, a chain of five islands progressively taller as they approached the mainland.
As with the skyscrapers, I thought: Huh? There are islands somewhere like that? (No.)
The coup de grace has been the most recent commercial, the one featuring Tom’s Shoes as a satisfied AT&T customer. Here’s the extended, one-minute version of that ad:
White trees. A stack of shoeboxes against the back wall. Fabric folded neatly and, aieee, stacked in five low columns on a table. The windows of a skyscraper as seen in a cell-phone’s viewing screen. Five stately arches on some building in the tropics. Sailboats on the horizon…
A new quintuple every 2 or 3 seconds.
It’s driving me mad, I tell you. Mad!
Edit to add: Shortly after posting this I realized I’d never said, even by implication, Yes, I know what the five things represent. Of course — you must be a complete idiot to ask me that!
Wow. It always creeps me out to find out how hard advertisers work on subliminal messaging. Now I question: Is Blake, the chief shoe-giver at Tom’s Shoes, real? Was his philanthropy real? OF COURSE (hee) I might be gullible for falling for it in the first place.
Jules: I should probably be (but strangely, am not) worried — if not flat-out becreeped — that I know the answer to that question.
Yes, Blake and his philanthropy are real. Here‘s a recent NY Times blog post about the whole thing.
I do admire the subtlety — or, uh, subliminality if you prefer — of the five-bars thing. Can’t STAND the Alltel guy’s commercials, though. Especially because Alltell seems to produce maybe one new one every five weeks or so, and play it relentlessly until the next one comes out.
Okay, I’ll stop obsessing now. (Not really.)
This is brilliant advertising. It actually makes you want to watch the commercial over and over to find the hidden bars in each shot. It’s like Where’s Waldo. Who can find the most bars. We’re each sure it’s us. Genius!
I don’t think the ad makers were trying to make a subliminal message per se. I imagine someone creating an ad and the idea for those bars just came to them-the way these sort of things do and they thought, “Cool!” Whoever made it probably bugged her or his friends, “DId you see how I got those bars in there? Did ya?”
But I’m naive.
Squirrel: Yeah! Well, I’m less enthusiastic about it in one sense — I don’t like this twitchy OCD feeling. But I know what you’re saying; it is indeed like the Waldo books. Or, what was it, that kids’ magazine in the doctor’s offices… Highlights for Children. They had a regular feature — a detailed drawing of a park, say — in which you were instructed to find, say, a chicken, an umbrella, a soccer ball, and so on… all of them hidden in the drawing somehow, so you had to turn it on its side and upside-down to inspect it carefully enough.
marta: Bet you’re right about the ad’s creator. In The One-Minute Manager, the author talks about noticing that the best, most creative employees couldn’t wait to tell him about the latest cool things they were up to. Not in a boastful aren’t-I-great way, but more like excitement at having been present when the idea coalesced out of the ether (or wherever ideas come from).