Friday, April 15, 2011

Jumping the Shark

It's official, T-Mobile's flashmob series has today jumped the shark.

In it's defence, I can see how they might have thought it was funny to pastiche the royal wedding (and done well it would have been); plus i like the idea behind Life's for Sharing.


However, the execution just is not funny. It fails to be entertaining, taking off a recentish net video, but with none of the self-awareness or light-heartedness that made the original so touching. It looks and feels like actors mugging, there is no sense that any of the expressions or actions are natural. Moves planned and set out wholesale.


It robs the video of likeability, and stops it being anywhere near as engaging as it could be.


Worst of all, I said before that T-Mobile had done a good job to avoid making the overused flashmob idea look old. Now it does.


Shark. Jumped.


Where next T-Mobile? We know you can do much better, I hope next time we get to see it.

4 comments:

gemma said...

Nice idea, but just for the wrong brand IMHO.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, it wasn't funny when the Office did it either.

Flashmobs with actors = not flashmobs.

Charles Edward Frith said...

Consider it shared.

Carol L. Weinfeld said...

Agree. They should have used the video as a departure point for inspiration, and not duplicated it.

@clweinfeld