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.