You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …
The Product:
Sprint’s Friends & Family (Framily) plan
The Promotion:
The Pitch:
Our Friends & Family plan is perfect for average American framilies just like this one!
Commercials are often built around doing one really weird thing to get viewers’ attention, before launching into the pitch. Like a dentist giving people surprise checkups in the middle of crowded movie theaters. Or supervillains trying to kill a battery-powered bunny. Or a girl melting into a literal pile of goo from smoking pot.
But I don’t think I’ve seen one approach the idea quite like this.
If you imagine the script for this commercial, it would read like a very tame and conventional ad. Just a family idly chit-chatting about Sprint’s new Friends & Family plan and how they feel about the contraction “framily”. Closest to something odd is the son who’s a little too defensive of “framily”, saying, “Dad, it’s like ‘spork’, or ‘keytar’. You’re my frather, I’m your fron, this is our framily.”
And likely someone at Sprint’s marketing department realized that such a basic ad would barely leave a shadow of a dent of an impression in anyone’s heads. It needed something off-beat in order to get attention. But rather than one weird thing, they just splashed some weird all over.
The dad is a talking hamster in one of those hamster balls. The younger son has a Southern accent when no one else in the framily does. The daughter speaks French, even though everyone else is speaking English without a trace of a French accent. And there are cartoon birds flying around the kid’s head, too. Oh, and the mom is Judy Greer, for no particular reason.
They throw every quirky idea they have into this framily, without any sort of unifying theme to tie them together … and change nothing else about the ad. It’s exactly the same banal conversation you’d get if none of this weird stuff was present, and the fact that the weird stuff is never even acknowledged makes it feel so much weirder.
While I’ve never signed up for Sprint myself, this ad did succeed in burning its way into my memory, thanks to its most peculiar framily.