T-Mobile: Sharing Life or Staged Experiences?

On Friday, Valeria over at Conversation Age posted Can Your Brand Design This Kind of Conversation? which contained this video.

At the end, you'll notice it's part of a T-Mobile campaign called Life's For Sharing.

Now, I like the video and I do think it is viral and will and has been shared. And yes, I agree with Valeria that it will cause conversation. My beef with it is that regardless of the medium, it's still an ad.

I would have much rather seen T-Mobile do something like this:

This makes T-Mobile and their technology a part of the story, a character if you will. Is it more of a conversation, less of an ad? That's up for debate. But at least this humanizes the brand while simultaneously demonstrating the technology and the power of "sharing life" using T-Mobile and it's products...which should be the point of the campaign I think.

Now, there is a LifesForSharing YouTube channel. I looked at the first 12 pages of videos and every one was professionally produced and none were really about sharing your life. So where T-Mobile really had a chance to have or to use Valeria's term, "design" a conversation, I'd argue they missed it.

What I wanted to see, what I expected to see was videos like this:

Or like this:

These are life moments shared via camera phone or Flip Video footage. By staying true to the brand/campaign promise, I think T-Mobile would have been better served and driven home their brand message so much more strongly than with a very expensive, albeit very cool ad.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Let me know via the comments.