Tone of voice

And we’re back. Sorry for the hiatus, but I’m now fully installed in the new house, ready to do battle once more with the verbal vicissitudes of the written world.

Starting right now. Evelina Dee-Shapland (who, it turns out, paints good pictures and used to work with David) sent me this:

‘I thought you might be able to decipher this message,’ Evelina writes. ‘I still can’t make any sense out of it.’

I don’t blame her. I’ve had it in for Orange’s branding for a while. To my mind, it’s at the vanguard of the sort of syrupy, pretentious nonsense so often passed off as brand communications.

It’s the result of too many people sitting alone together for too long, taking themselves a bit too seriously, and forgetting they’re selling a service.

As Evelina says, what on earth does this mean?

Yes, I ‘get it’. A person is the sum of their experiences, the places they’ve been, the people who have influenced them, etc. And, we are invited to infer, Orange is the thing that connects all those elements of life. Not so much a communications company as The Force. It’s all summed up in this TV spot:

I understand the theory. But all I see in the ad is a lot of rather smug-looking people, cookie-cuttered out of someone’s research document on ‘aspirational’ personalities, and a rather gloopy, earnestly everymanny voiceover.

And all I hear in the copy, as on Evelina’s bag, is a rather pompous attempt to pretend Orange has ascended to some subtle plane of cultural activity far beyond the grubby commercial imperatives of selling stuff.

Ultimately, my problem is that the campaign has no charm, or humour. It’s all so desperately serious and important, like a callow teenager trying to get girls into bed by pretending to be deep and sensitive and intense. ‘Hey, you know, I wrote a poem about you. Nobody else understands, but I just know you will…’

I find myself wanting it to back off, stop whispering in my ear and stroking my arm, and just tell me what the hell it wants.

Now. A lot of very bright people have thought long and hard about this campaign. I should know, because I work in that world and I know how difficult and complicated it is to put something like this together. So perhaps I’m being very unfair.

But if we’re talking tone of voice (and we are), all I can say is that Orange’s tone of voice turned me off the brand pretty violently when I was a customer, and I feel heartily glad not to have any association with its furrow-browed, navel-gazing solipsism now.

(It doesn’t help that I also felt the service fell short of the rather lofty positioning – a very quick way to irritate customers.)

For the other side of the story, you can see Orange’s former UK Brand Director Justin Billingsley, and Magnus Jabber from Fallon (the agency), discussing the campaign here. I suppose I probably shouldn’t expect a call from either of them any time soon.