T-Mobile knows how kids and parents communicate these days — and it isn’t face-to-face. So instead of falsely manufacturing a sitcom-like situation where somehow kids and parents are sitting around together as a family (sure, right), T-Mobile just show us the texts. It’s 2019 realism from a self-aware company. So T-Mobile, which also happens to own the connections that make the texts flow, delivers a very funny mother-child dialogue scrolling on a phone — just where millions of similar exchanges take place in real life.
One challenge with this dialogue technique for an ad is that texts are still mercifully pretty quiet. (Google and other big tech companies want everything to have and use a voice, but some technologies still resist — like the simple text.) So T-Mobile has to fill in the dull silence with a happy easygoing sound to set our minds at ease during the commercial — while we listen to the quiet clicks and read the texts. The ad makers totally hit a homerun by choosing “Beauty School Dropout”, the Frankie Avalon song from the musical Grease. (Music link above, lyrics here.) It’s a perfect rhythm to text to, and a soothing sound to read to.
