Tele2 Dog

Last week, CEO of Cadbury Schweppes Todd Stitzer revealed
better-than-expected financial results for the UK company.
Briefing the press, he said, "For the Chinese, 2007 was the year of
the pig. For Cadbury, it was the year of the gorilla.”



He went on to admit that he couldn’t quite fathom how the
drumming primate had done so much to revive the fortunes of his
ailing chocolate brand. "I am a 55-year-old person who has lived
through a different advertising experience ... In the end, I trusted
in the young and talented people who came up with the idea."

Sometimes we forget that brilliant advertising needs a bold client
to buy it. Full credit then to Cadbury marketing director Phil
Rumbol for (a) buying the idea from Fallon himself before (b)
having the bottle to sell it to his board.
No entirely rational human being could have done it. Which brings
me to the Tele2 dog.

Tele2 is a Swedish telecomms company, who have no obvious
reason for putting up a site such as this except that people will love
it – especially younger people, who comprise the bulk of their
audience.

The trouble is, there are just too many brands around today. As a
result, there’s been a rise in what you might call brand shagging.
Take a brand for everything it’s got and then dump it and move on
to another.

The fact remains, though, that if a brand is likeable, amusing, good
company, then when it does come down to expressing your
preferences, you’ll choose a friend. You might even be knowingly
irrational when you make that choice. For instance, Innocent
smoothies are about 60p more expensive than PJ’s but I could no
more drink PJ’s than I could sulphuric acid.

But I like Innocent. And you know what? I like Tele2 too.

/Patrick Collister/