Episode 98: “Do you love me?”
I love the idea of flash mobs, even though I’ve never actually participated in one myself yet. I went to last year’s Real Life Rickroll at Liverpool Street Station, but I didn’t know the lyrics so couldn’t really sing along.
If you don’t know what a flash mob is, it’s basically a large group of people meeting somewhere and doing something unusual. For instance, the one that I went to was to get as much people together during rush hour at Liverpool Street station and sing Never Gonna Give You Up from Rick Astley and then leave. You can imagine the amazement of all the people who hadn’t heard about it beforehand. Another example is the Ninja attack. I don’t remember where it was exactly, but a group of people dressed as ninjas started fighting each other in a busy park.
Now T-Mobile has come out with the following ad:
[Watch the video]
While I do like how the people there responded to it, I’m a bit annoyed by it. All those people dancing have got to be professionals, right? Or at least hired to do this dance. Somehow this would have made more sense, more impact, to me, if they had organized this like an actual flash mob. Get actual people, who want to do it for the fun of it, not because they are payed to do it. Am I the only one who thinks this?
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January 21st, 2009 at 1:35
Yea. I guess it’s another example of corporate bigshots muscling in on populist originality, but as TV commercials go it has more charm than most. I don’t know how many times I’ve been in big stuffy public spaces like that and wished something wild would happen. The terrorists would try dancing instead of blowing things up. You make a statement either way.
January 21st, 2009 at 8:04
For what they had planned, shooting the ad, you need it to be managed. If you look at the Youtube channel, you can see footage of rehearsals. Now, there’s no reason why this group could not have been found via the web channels, but they would have still had to rehearse.
An alternative would have been to do this as an ‘experience’, where they used PR and social media outreach to raise a flash mob as you would normally. They would have then been criticised anyway and may not have got anything useful to use in mass broadcast.
The audience for this ad is MASS – it’s broadcast TV. Most people who have seen it will not be aware of the Improv/flashmob movement except in a superficial way, they’ll have read it in the papers but not be aware of the background. T-Mobile got a feel-good ad out of this that was easily used because it was planned.
January 26th, 2009 at 15:56
There is another Dance Event and T-mobile are making it into another advert I think.
I love the advert but when ever I see it I’m like chilling out and dont have the energy to get up and dance to it! lol
April 28th, 2009 at 13:00
[...] in January I blogged about T-Mobile’s “flashmob” at Liverpool Street Station. I liked the idea, but was a bit annoyed by the fact that unlike normal [...]