Both of these are reuploads. Three has not kept an official copy of its own most famous ad live on YouTube, which is a small tragedy and a reminder to archive your own work. The second link is an ad-archive channel, kept as a backup in case the first one goes. 60 seconds, and the track is Fleetwood Mac's Everywhere.
In 2013 every mobile network in Britain sold you the same thing in the same voice: speed, coverage, bars on a map, a serious man on a train getting serious work done. The category had decided that the internet in your pocket was a productivity tool, and priced itself accordingly.
Which is not what anyone was actually doing with it. People were sending each other rubbish. Clips of animals falling over. Photos of a friend asleep with their mouth open. Nonsense, constantly, all day. Three's argument was that this is not a degraded use of the technology, it is the technology's real job, and that the silly stuff is what actually holds friendships together between the times you see each other.
So the brand line was not about the network at all.
If your position is that daft internet nonsense is valuable, do not make an ad that explains that. Make the daft internet nonsense, and spend television money on it.
A Shetland pony, alone on a cliff top in Shetland, moonwalking to Everywhere. That is the whole ad. No product, no proposition, no phone in shot, no tariff, no man on a train.
Dougal Wilson directed it through Blink, on location at Eshaness in the Shetland Islands, so the landscape and the pony are real and only the dancing is not. That matters more than it sounds: shooting a real animal in a real, extremely beautiful, extremely cold place is what stops the film reading as a cartoon, and the gap between the gorgeous cinematography and the moonwalk is where the joke lives.
Then the part that turns a spot into a campaign. W+K and B-Reel built the Pony Mixer, a responsive site where you picked a track and made your own version of the pony's dance to share. The ad was not the artefact. The ad was a template, handed over on day one, and the hashtag was the instruction: #DancePonyDance.
Seventeen days is how long the burst ran.
The stupid: you are a challenger network in fourth place, fighting on price against three larger rivals, and you spend your flagship TV budget on a horse doing a Michael Jackson move in a field. There is no product message. There is no phone. There is no reason given to switch, no data allowance, no coverage claim, nothing a sales director could point at in a meeting. If it does not become a thing, you have bought a very expensive minute of nothing, and the trade press will enjoy writing about it.
The smart: the film is not a piece of advertising about the positioning, it is a working demonstration of it. Three said the silly stuff matters, then made a silly thing worth sending to a friend, and the fact that a million people did send it to a friend is the proof of the claim. You cannot argue with that structure. Note also what they did with the budget: instead of buying more reach, they spent it on craft, on a real location, a real animal and a director who could make sixty seconds of nonsense look like a film. Cheap silly is just cheap. Expensive silly is a gift. And the Pony Mixer is the bit most people forget, because it converts the audience from viewers into makers, which is the only reliable way an ad stays alive past its media buy.
The steal: do not explain your positioning, perform it. If your brand claims to stand for something, the ad itself should be an example of the thing, not a description of it.
This is a category-escape trick that almost nobody has the nerve to run, because the whole apparatus of a telco marketing department is built to talk about the telco. Three worked out that the network is not the product, the stuff that arrives over it is, and then had the discipline to leave the network entirely out of the ad.
We also like it as evidence that "brand" and "fame" are not fluffy words. A pony moonwalking put a 1987 Fleetwood Mac album track back into the UK top 20 for the first time in a quarter of a century. That is a piece of advertising reaching out of its own slot and moving something in the culture that had nothing to do with it. You cannot buy that. You can only make something people want to pass on.
The view, mixer, tweet and impression figures (100 million plus) and the claimed 67% rise in positive brand sentiment all come from Wieden+Kennedy's own case page, so they are the agency's numbers rather than audited ones. The chart figure is the solid one and it is our favourite: Everywhere climbed 72 places to number 15 in March 2013, the Official Charts' highest climber that week, and Fleetwood Mac's first UK top 20 single in 25 years. It had peaked at number 4 in 1988.
What we could not find is a business number. No share, no churn, no net adds tied to the campaign, and no published effectiveness paper. For a piece of work this famous that gap is worth naming rather than papering over. Three did keep going with the strategy for years, through Sing It Kitty and the rest, which is its own kind of evidence, since clients rarely renew a line that is not selling anything.
Client: Three UK
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy London
Creative directors: Dan Norris and Ray Shaugnessy
Creatives: Freddie Powell and Hollie Walker
Agency producer: Michelle Brough
Director: Dougal Wilson, through Blink
Pony Mixer: B-Reel, interface and build
Music: Everywhere, Fleetwood Mac, written and sung by Christine McVie, 1987
Location: Eshaness, Shetland Islands
Ran: February and March 2013
Wieden+Kennedy's own case page, for the results
Campaign, on the launch and the credits
Creative Review, on the film and the Pony Mixer
Three's own press release
The Official Charts climb for Everywhere
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: