No-one knows a woman better than her phone

I’m often asked about good examples of tech brands connecting with women. Unfortunately there are very few tech brands that understand what women care about. This new Nokia campaign is a wonderful exception: It invites people to explore the lives of three fictional women in intimate detail and in real time, through their Nokia 7610 smart-phones.

We are invited to follow the lives of the three characters as they make-friends, party, send text-messages to the wrong-boyfriend, break-up, flirt, make-up and do other gripping soap-opera-ish things that somehow nearly always seem to involve the use of mobile technology. The story unfolds through a series of multimedia-messages left by and on the three characters mobile phones. If you’ve got enough time you can piece together what happened on their latest night out. Nokia clearly hope that this will inspire phone users to use their phones more like Anna, Jade and Luca on their next night out.

I have to confess that I didn’t have time to work through the whole campaign - each of the characters have hundreds of messages to work through - but I was impressed by the tasteful design and immersive appeal of the whole thing. It’s full of neat touches, like the fact that you can customize the site by activating a number of tastefully selected tunes as the story unfolds - all of which are on sale at the new Nokia music store.

The TV ad and accompanying on-line campaign are great work and seem to be pitched well for a young-adult audience. I think Nokia will need to work really hard if they want to make their products as appealing to the next generation of phone-buyers as Apple’s much-hyped iPhone.

What I love about it is they have really understood the role of the mobile phone: “its a window into a woman’s life.” Women use their phone to film, flirt and play. I’ll never forget one woman telling me that no-one knows her as well as her mobile phone. I also love the idea of everyone secretly wanting to be a voyeur and wanting to go through someone’s phone. Everyone’s curious. I know I am. My new nanny left her phone in my house and I was so tempted to go through her phone to get an insight into who she was. I refrained. But had the phone been in my view for much longer who knows….

Compare this Nokia campaign to the lackluster Blackberry campaign - which looks like a messy pastiche of something Apple might have done five years ago.

The idea is similar ‘Life on Blackberry‘ but suffers from a lifeless execution which is unsure of it’s target audience. It’s little more than a visual idea and sadly lives and dies only on TV. Nokia’s latest campaign was born to span all media and truly captures the intimacy that women feel towards their phone.

For all of the project’s interactivity it’s not truly interactive: As far as I’m aware fans cannot text their favorite characters and get involved with them… the character’s facebook page has a kind of ghostly silence that contrasts wrongly with the fast-paced hedonism of the main campaign web-site. Users seemed to be confused as to whether these are real people or merely actors playing characters - how very post-modern to blur that line.

Lastly, I think Wieden could have promoted the idea a bit harder. It feels like they have missed the opportunity to release this via bloggers and create a real buzz around the campaign. For all the work they have done it would be a shame if this became the best campaign that nobody got to see.