It doesn’t matter how great your advertising campaign is, if your basic product is rubbish it will all amount to naught. You can’t gild shit as they say.

A case in point is the current campaign for 3-Mobile’s video call service. The advert is one of the most striking I’ve ever seen, that is right up until the moment when the product makes its first appearance on our screen. At which point the whole thing falls flat on its arse.

Let me explain how it goes…

The music strikes up; it’s the might T-Rex and their magnum opus, ‘Children of the Revolution’. We see an image of the whole earth from space. The screen then cuts to white and with the slogan, “They said it was flat”.

The next image comes on. It’s a crown scene from a Beatles US concert. Black and white film of young fans in shock and awe of seeing their idols on stage right in front of them. Again the screen cuts to whit with the new slogan, “They said it was just a passing phase”.

Then the third image comes into play, remember that Marc Bolan is banging away about how the children won’t be fooled all the way through this - stirring stuff. Anyway, the third image is from some time in the mid 1980s of some business type standing on a crowded railway station and talking into an enormous ‘mobile’ phone, that’s bigger than a housebrick! The screen then cuts to white with the slogan, “They said it would never catch on.”

Now your probably expecting another series of the image / slogan pattern, but no. It cuts straight to another slogan of, “What do they know”. It makes you sit up and take notice I can tell you. However it’s at this point that the advert is about to fail in its basic premise of making you want to buy the product. Yes folks, you’re about to see a video mobile phone in action!

We see a man and a woman sitting together in an office environment – bright, well lit, pine furniture – that sort of thing. When suddenly the guy’s mobile phone goes off. He opens it up and we see a little film of three colleagues of his on the phone’s screen. Cut again to these three colleagues, one of who is holding a phone in front of himself while all three of them wave and gurn down the phone. Switch back to first couple, they wave to their phone and gurn and laugh happily.

I’m sorry, did I miss something here? What is the f*cking point of that? You’ve supposedly got a major piece of wonderful modern technology in your hands, you’ve got an advertising budget of millions and the creative force of a large advertising agency at your disposal – yet this is the best use of the phone that you can come up with?

This total lack of content is why I believe that video mobile phones are just gilded sh*t