As it's cut off half of it, just double-click on the video to watch it on Youtube. Sorry.
Well, anyway, it’s a lot like another iPhone ad that we saw in the paper which the characters are using the same app[lication] to talk, yet again to someone who gone done broke a limb (see below). This time it’s a kid with an injured his arm (tibia or fibula we assume) showing the cast to a guy who looks like a cross between Karl Pilkington and the evil Dad in This is England '86. We are left to connect the dots and hazard a guess that this is a father-son moment (“good” adverts always like to leave you to fill in the back story). This guess is only an educated one in so far as paedophilia in advertising is not going to win anyone over. Though, there is a side-effect in that paedophiles will see these technologies as a new avenue to explore their abuse. (We’re not joking around when we mention this by the way. It’s just true.)
Only one word could be read: End
The tagline is: “Introducing FaceTime video calling. Smile.” The name - FaceTime - is a pretty blatant signal as to what these adverts are getting at. Spending time face-to-face, meeting-up, catching-up, quality time together, etc. etc: i.e. all the very things that, according to common perception, iPhones and their techne brethren are preventing within the family unit. ("Smile." is a bit of good ol'passive-aggressive dictatorial advertising added on for good measure: DO THIS, BUY THIS, and so it goes on.)
We all know how the argument goes visa-vis the idea that we all just sit around, watching different programs on different TVs, when we want, not when it’s scheduled… We’re on the internet talking to our friends rather than being out with them in the park on the merry-go-rounds… We don’t even talk on the ‘phone anymore, we just send each other pictures of our genitalia in various postures and poses, replete with ironic accoutrements and now these expressionist dick-dances are superseding oral conversation as the main mode of communication for today’s youth...
So this is exactly what the iPhone adverts avoid like the fucking plague. They don’t want to evoke the image of technology actually in the home, when the members of this family are actually all together, at one time, in the fucking building—precisely because it’ll seem so unreal to people (the people at home) that these people (the people on screen) would actually spend time together.
And it’s not strictly the fact —DEERRRR— that no company would make a phone advert where the characters are not using their phones. Rather, these ads are directly taking on the idea that technology is pulling everyone apart. And this isn’t just Apple. Loads of companies are in on it; BT foremost among them (as we mentioned before). Across the spectrum is the narrative that we’re all apart in our lives so get this product, it’ll bring you and whoever together, OK?
As it's cut off half of it, just double-click on the video to watch it on Youtube. Sorry.
With this loneliness written into every advert, there’s no way we can look at the BT Infinity adverts and think of anything apart from the fact that the seemingly happy couple are looking to the future, and to INFINITY, because they, like everyone else in the ad, want to die. BT has hit upon the core of modern life, surely? No matter how joyous and content we may appear, we’re all so desperately sad and lonely that we haze longingly into the infinite, colourless nothing that is our death. The children of the famous BT couple have gone — where we do not know — and now they seem to be contemplating some suicide pact or waiting for the new BT to arrive. So, it’s either death or BT’s version of Infinity. The choice is yours.
We’ve got Virgin Media.
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