Works in more places, like Interschizophreneography

If, during the upcoming winter, we experience an uptick in traffic accidents, it won't be because of people talking on their cell phones, it won't be because of inebriated holiday drivers, and it won't even be because of ice on the roads. It will all be because of the linguistic monstrosity that is the new AT&T billboards.

I was driving along a slightly busy road the first time I saw one, and I have to admit that it was a little intriguing. A nonsense word, a globe fashioned out of the AT&T logo, and a few things sticking out of the globe. It took sitting through a red light before I got the entire message: the nonsense word was an amalgamation of China, London, and Moscow, and the things sticking out of the globe were the Great Wall, Big Ben, and Red Square. (It took me a while to figure out that Chi was China, not Chicago, and that Big Ben was not, as it appeared at a distance through less than 20/20 vision, the Sears Tower.)

Which hits at the major problem with any billboard that doubles as a puzzle--you really shouldn't need more than a second or two to figure it out. View the AT&T billboard during bumper-to-bumper traffic and you've got a chance; try to decipher it at 75 miles per hour, and you're likely to end up crashing your Pontiacuraccord and getting treated for a dislocussion at St. Bartholomatthewenceslaus. Different advertising media have different strengths and weaknesses--billboards have great reach and can be effective with a simple, straightforward message. But for some reason AT&T has seen fit to use basically the exact same (convoluted) ad for TV (directed by Wes Anderson), web, print, and billboard. Talk about your monotonoredundantising!

From a positioning standpoint, the AT&T campaign doesn't make much sense either. Stripped down to its essence, the ads boil down to the following message: We have a big network. Isn't that exactly what Verizon has been saying for about five years? And while AT&T showcases fictional customers who require coverage in an unlikely (and often exotic) combination of locales, Verizon focuses on the omnipresence of the network without dwelling on specific places. And that's leaving aside the focus of many bloggers who have written on the subject of the new ad campaign (as I discovered when I Googled "Chilondoscow"), that the claim of a network that is reliable in myriad places is simply not true. My favorite, which I can no longer find, says, "Works in Maybe-over-by-the-window-but-not-in-your-cube-istan."

In case you're interested, the obscene amount of orange in the new AT&T ads is a result of the recent merger with Cingular. It is apparently the only part of the old Cingular logo that has survived the merger.