Mills on ... WCRS's Orange finale.(Brief Article)

As swansongs go, WCRS's last campaign for Orange (Campaign, last week) is pretty low-key. There's none of the grand sweeping statements or awesome widescreen feel that we've come to expect from previous Orange ads. Indeed, the production budget for this campaign must have been tiny, even if the 7 million [pounds sterling] media budget will ensure ubiquity.

I can't help feeling a touch sorry about this. If the last act of an opera or a film is always a stunning crescendo, so, you feel, should be the campaign that marks the end of one of the definitive agency-client relationships of recent years. When you go, you want to go out in style. As a strictly neutral observer, I'd love WCRS to have been able to do the same. Then they could say to Orange: "See what you're missing." And they'd lay down a challenge to Lowe Lintas: "Go on then, see if you can do better than that."

Alas, it is not to be. What we have though is still, in many ways, characteristically Orange. In the 30-second animated spot, we see a harassed nurse working at night in a maternity ward. Then we see a group of students/schoolchildren burst out of lessons at the end of the day. Finally, we close on a vampire taking his bat out for a stroll. Throughout, the ad is in the brand's orange and black colours. The point? Well, it's a simple one: to illustrate that Orange's pre-pay service comes with a variety of off-peak call times. In this 24/7 work culture, it's obvious that one person's off-peak is another's busy time and that to shoehorn everyone into the same off-peak smacks of old-fashioned BT-type corporate arrogance. Hence the campaign's tagline: "No eek in off peak."

As I said, this is along way from some of the epic films -- think bicycling Asians, think Ridley Scott, think orangutans -- that made Orange famous. But in other respects, it's true to Orange and its ability to move the game on and to change the rules of customer service. The idea of multiple off-peak times ...