Dave Gee: Life from Right Field

British cellphone operator T-Mobile have borrowed an idea from the guys at Improv Everywhere for their latest television ad campaign.

The mobile company (well actually, T-Mobile's advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi) got 350 dancers to gather in London's Liverpool Street train station on the morning of January 15th.

At 11am, the various groups of people (dressed as regular commuters or station staff) broke into a mass dance routine, as a musical medley of hip-hop, pop, disco, and ballroom tunes played over the train station's intercom system.

The advertisement was shot "guerrilla-style", with hidden TV cameras (both fixed and handheld mobile phone cameras) around Liverpool St station to capture the mass dance, and the spontaneous reactions of London commuters.

According to T-Mobile, the flashmob-style stunt was aimed at "illustrating the fact some things in life are worth sharing and T-mobile can help with that sharing."

The stunt does borrow a little from the American-based Improv Everywhere group, whose Frozen Grand Central mission involving 200 people made headlines around the world in January 2008, and led to similar "freezing" improv stunts in 70 international cities.

T-Mobile's campaign is still worth watching though... The full length clip premiered in the UK as an "ad break takeover" on Channel 4 during Celebrity Big Brother, with a 60 second version of the tv commercial set to run through the rest of the month...

* Brand Republic - Behind the scenes at T-Mobile's new shoot