Digifone communicates with clarity, relevance

Denis Goodbody, director, ADept. Creative Facilities.

Over the last year I have often wondered how our industry survived before mobile phones and the Internet. Whether it be recruitment pages, television, billboards or radio, it appears that the bulk of advertising spends, both media and creative, are being directed at deregulated telecoms, mobile telephony, text messaging and dotcoms.

We have to ask ourselves, however, are we communicating? Are the public listening? Are they comprehending? And how much do they care? Then there was the great WAP debacle. It arrived and no one seemed to care. Thank God for the early adopters who went out there in their droves, bought them and apparently didn't use them. This allowed the rest of us Luddites to hold back before committing to a technology that was going to improve in time , which thankfully, I believe it has. Digifone came up with the answer, Digifone On-line. Don't call it a WAP, call it an Internet Phone. Brilliant in its simplicity. Then illustrate clearly and simply why you might want to use it.

Free of the latent techiness of the acronym WAP, the phrase Internet Phone told all. A series of ads brought it all to us with clarity, humour and - that rare thing - relevance. So that lad in the railway end of Lansdowne Road got the message - via the PA system - from his girlfriend Ciara that it was his turn to cook the dinner. There was the man with the dog on the Ha'penny bridge.

Can I tell you blow by blow, word for word, what happened in those commercials? Can I recount what effects were used, what the music was, who directed them or what awards they won? No I can't. But I can tell you that Digifone released the Internet into the wild, allowing me to do all kinds of Internety things wherever I want, unfettered by acronyms like PC and WAP. Yes some of the ads were quite elaborate but in all the examples I encountered, there was a simple communication, well expressed. That's what we all should be aspiring to.