Telecom Italia Domestic Wireline’s new advertising campaign for its brand new residential market ADSL offering goes live on Sunday 14 April. Christian Vieri and Fernanda Lessa star in the television adverts. Ruggiero: “Domestic Wireline is investing 800 million euros to develop ADSL in Italy.”
Telecom Italia’s latest advertising campaign is on air from Sunday 14 April. The headline star of the show is “Alice”, Telecom Italia Domestic Wireline’s new ADSL offering for Internet access, featuring a whole raft of price benefits and improved standards of service. Alice starts commercialization from 15 April.
The fully cross-media campaign will appear on television, film screens, in the press, on posters, on the radio and on the Net. Through these high impact media Telecom Italia is informing different targets of the benefits of ADSL broadband over copper.
Why “Alice”?
Alice is undoubtedly an innovative and highly original brand name for the Italian Internet market. Telecom Italia has chosen this sweet-sounding girl’s name in an attempt to extend the allure of broadband to people who perceive modern technologies as cold and detached, sometimes even as menacing. Following in the footsteps of the wonderland heroine of Lewis Carroll’s children’s book, Alice is ready to quickly and easily bring ADSL into every home in Italy, and whirl people off on an adventure of discovery in the wonderful world of the Internet.
This explains the campaign pay-off, “Alice, an Internet Wonderland”, conceived by copywriter Emanuele Madeddu and art director Patrizio Marini for Fagan Reggio Del Bravo.
The Alice logo, featuring bright colours and horizontal stripes connecting up to the Net, highlights a woman’s eye-view of the future as it opens up to the world of new technologies.
And the wonders do not cease at the Internet.
Television adverts
For such an innovative brand name, the stars of the television adverts could only be a major coup for the advertising world: the pairing of Fernanda Lessa – Christian Vieri makes an unstoppable attacking force on the ADSL field of play. Vieri, centre forward for Inter and the Italian national team, worked on the ad for four days with the stunning Brazilian model, travelling to a number of sets around Milan, including the Meazza Stadium, the San Siro racetrack, and an amazing post-industrial loft.
In the two amusing campaign teasers, on air from 14 April, Vieri is alone, oblivious to what is going on around him. His thoughts are completely absorbed by the world of Alice: in the first teaser, he comes out of the changing rooms but fails to answer questions put to him by journalists; in the second advert, he is at a restaurant where he pays no attention whatsoever to the waiter who is expecting his order.
Christian Vieri and Brazilian supermodel Fernanda Lessa team up from 21 April in an advert that revolves around comic misunderstandings. First Christian catches sight of Fernanda with the Alice product in her hands, and thinks that she is the delivery woman. Then one of the football player’s friends, thinking that Alice is the name of the girl, calls the 187 service to track her down, but then a few days later an efficient Telecom Italia engineer turns up on his doorstep to install Alice.
The adverts go out on all of Italy’s main television networks.
“This advertising campaign for our new residential ADSL offerings,” says Riccardo Ruggiero, Head of Telecom Italia Domestic Wireline, “is a major step forward for me and for the entire management at Telecom Italia’s fixed-line telephony unit. The strategy we have developed for boosting the entire domestic telecommunications industry in Italy, and for accelerating modernization of the country, is based upon growth of the broadband market over copper. This is why we are investing over 800 million euros in ADSL between now and 2004.”