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Leave it to Beaver
Like it or not, big bad Rogers will be the exclusive provider of Apple’s beautiful and magnificent and world-changing iPhone, and as each week goes by it’s getting harder and harder to mitigate disgust for the former with adoration for the latter.
It was nice, then, to find out that Bell turned their Norm MacDonald–voiced beaver into something truly great: a great big middle finger to Rogers (and Apple). Bell’s ad in this week’s NOW sends up the familiar and ubiquitous iPod silhouette with the almost-as-ubiquitous beaver to pimp Bell’s own product—”Canada’s largest mobile music library.” Take that, iTunes! Sort of!
The ad would be even better if we weren’t as ambivalent about Bell as we are about Rogers: earlier this week the CRTC decided to not provide “interim relief” to customers and wholesalers whose traffic Bell was throttling. The CRTC will make a final decision by the end of the year, but what’s unfortunately clear already is that Rogers and Bell are in a race to see which of the two largest telecommunication companies can provide worse service to their customers. Here’s hoping this ad triggers some kind of country-wide race to the bottom that sees the mutual destruction of both parties, and new and fair competitors rising from their ashes to provide us all with literal and figurative salvation.
Until then—well, we’ll have to just deal. And buy iPhones.
Thanks to reader Aric Guite for the tip and photo.