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Cowboys and jellyfish

drjbrennan

drjbrennan

Ephemeral Spectre
Joined
Aug 14, 2001
Messages
313
The 3 phone network advert is the most enjoyable and watchable ad on tv at the moment, but does anyone know what is it all about?

Giant stranded jellyfish, japanese cowboys, blue moonshine in mason jars, breakdancing to drunken coelenterate music?

Somebody must be able to crack the code!
 
I was pondering whether to start a thread on this as it is genuinely odd - I will move it over to Fortean Culture. We certainly aren't the only people wondering:

http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Search/Question65721-16.asp?Page=1&SearchText=jellyfish
For those that haven't seen it the ad must be somewhere online - although I can't find it here:

http://www.visit4info.com

I'm not sure if there is anything useful on the firm's site:

http://www.three.co.uk

[edit: I might as well add that I doubt it means anything at all and it was just designed to be cool but.........]
 
drjbrennan said:
Thanks for the link to answerbank, what a good site that is!
Click to expand...

Yeah I did a quick Google and didn't find very much except that site - there are a number of questions about that ad on there (most looking for the name of the song as is nearly all the online questions about it - it by "The Infadels" if anyone is interested).
 
i think the advert is a bit rubbish.
i've speculated about it with some friends and one of them reckoned it was something to do with sharing, because they share their magic booze with the jellyfish alien.
 
It's not actually about anything.
It's a 'viral marketing' idea. Produce something really weird and inexplicable, and it'll catch the imagination of people who watch it.
They'll all start talking about it, in much the same way that we are discussing it here.
 
Probably knocked off the old 'critter' story though, with all it's Reichian overtones. Evidence of several things, (a) that Fortean culture is so close to 'everyday' culture as to be indistinguishable, (b) that Grant Morrison wasn't far off when he talked about 'Invisibles' infiltrating the media and (c) that a desperate advertising company will knock absolutely anything off that they can get their hands on, including your name and the gold teeth in your gob.

If you don't know what the 'critter'story is, I can't be bothered to go into it now. The advert more or less tells you everything you need to know. Unhelpful to the last, that's Edward Hyde.
 
Mythopoeika said:
It's not actually about anything.
It's a 'viral marketing' idea. Produce something really weird and inexplicable, and it'll catch the imagination of people who watch it.
They'll all start talking about it, in much the same way that we are discussing it here.
Click to expand...


Exactly. So let's all stop talking about it eh, cuz it's working.

:rolleyes:
 
I'd rather see a couple of gauchos getting a giant jellyfish pissed than watch a sanitary towel being soaked with blue liquid, or someone cleaning the toilet ;)
 
as ususal it hasnt worked on me..i can remeber the ad..but not the product .. shucks i guess its just too clever for me.
 
Arthur ASCII said:
I'd rather see a couple of gauchos getting a giant jellyfish pissed than watch a sanitary towel being soaked with blue liquid, or someone cleaning the toilet ;)
Click to expand...

Testify
 
Er, phone company?

I thought they were advertising beer! You know, guys see alien, guys drink beer, alien drinks beer, we all like beer, it makes us do cool dance moves, hey this freakin' beer is cool right? See, even aliens like this beer etc etc.

What friggerty planet am I from then? :rolleyes:

Must lay off the beer...
 
It could be taken as being pretty pro-beer.

And I was busting some sweet jellyfish-esque moves last night after more than a few beers.

So it's all good

"Here's to her"
 
er... made-up language, or japanese?
They are in fact Japanese gauchos who find the jellyfish in the middle of a desert.

Not that that factlet add anything to the experience of the dancing jellyfish.
 
It got picked up by the Garudian's "The Hard Sell" column (which looks at a different ad or campaign each week):

THREE

The new ad, featuring body-popping Japanese cowboys worshipping an outsized jellyfish, jolted something within me. Rarely is advertising at once so beautiful, groundbreaking, mesmerising yet utterly unintelligible. It began to annoy me. What did a mutant sea creature have to do with selling a hi-tech, multimedia phone network? Why Japanese cowboys? Why the break-dancing? Was it just an expensive, deliberately surreal, 40-second slap to the chops, designed to wake Britain up to Three? Or was I, despite repetitive viewing, missing the crucial message? Rest easy, readers — OK, I may have spent over 28 hours pondering this complex equation of Japanese anthropology and post-modern signifiers, but I've nailed it. So, the ad works on two levels. Firstly, cowboys worshipping and dancing before a sea creature is surreal in British eyes, but not, it seems, to the Japanese. In Hakodate, Japan, each August, there's a festival honouring the squid. This vast tentacle-based knees-up culminates in 20,000 wobbly.limbed squid dance, aka the "Ika-odoi-i". Hence, the interplay of weird hats, squid adoration and body-popping might seem fresh, enchanting and even unnerving to us, but to the Japanese it's as radical as morris dancing. "We love sharing," shouts Three's tagline, and if the entire world signed up for its space-age network and . began communicating, we'd learn fabulous new facts like this every day. Got 1 that? Good. Secondly, the ugly, wobbly sea creature symbolises the 3G network ; itself. Our two cowboy heroes take a risk and drag something scary and unknown | into their home. This could be a disaster, but with patience and understanding the | entity lights up their lives. In a funny way, the ad says, this is exactly like signing I up for Three! Sure, it's frightening. Of course you don't understand it. But just get | your bloody wallet out and sign the contract. Soon you'll be beaming out video 1 and audio clips, helping unite the planet and eventually, apparently, break-= dancing with glee at your ingenuity. Or something like that, anyway.
Click to expand...
 
Didn't three do those insane ads with Anna Friel in them too? The one where she wandered round a restaurant shouting at breadsticks like some addled vagrant, trying to get wine glasses to talk to pepperpots, was mental - it was like reality stopped for about ten seconds at a time. She looked as baffled by the whole exercise as we were.
 
I suspect the weird visuals are all meant to suggest that a video phone would be a great way to communicate about such weird things
 
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