OPINION: Mills on ... 11 88 88.(Editorial)

Remembering phone numbers, eh. How is it that I can remember some from years ago, but not the mobiles of friends, family and sometimes even my own? Take the old ads for the Evening Standard classified (35 35 000) - still as fresh as yesterday in my mind. And I can hum the jingle too, even though it must be at least 15 years since the ads ran. Or that one for an insurance company, 28 28 00, whose logo was an owl (geddit?) Sadly, its name escapes me.

And then there's the whole new 118 directory enquiries service numbers game. All of which reminds me of that wonderful film a few years ago, starring Guy Pearce as a man who loses his memory. But not all of it.

Pearce's character, Leonard Shelby, suffers from a condition called anterograde amnesia, meaning he cannot create any new long-term memories. This is a bit of problem, since Shelby is trying to retrace his steps to discover his wife's killer. Was it him? He just doesn't know. The twist, of course, is that he's already avenged his wife, but doesn't remember. And the name of the film? Er, Memento, but I had to look it up.

Memory, of course, is what the 118 advertising fight is all about. Trouble is that, the antics of the beardy 118 118 runners apart, it's becoming incredibly tedious, so much so that a bit of anterograde amnesia would come as blessed relief.

Nevertheless, it is a breathtakingly one-dimensional advertising task: plant your number in the consumer's mind and there you go because we'll only have room in our memory banks for one 118 number. Brand values? Strictly for the birds and entirely valueless at this stage since this is the advertising equivalent of a land grab. Anyway, who needs brand values when you're talking about something as basic as a directory enquiries service? It's also, by the way, an example of a market where advertising is everything.

One can ...