Following Publicis & Hal Riney's "Connectile Dysfunction" effort months back, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners has issued its first interactive work for Sprint with a focus on calling time, or the lack thereof. With the new 'Wait Less' destination, the wireless carrier wants to help you "fast-forward through the boring parts of life" and promote what Sprint hopes is a better calling plan. "This is the only carrier that offers you calling plans free starting at 7pm," says GS&P creative director Christian Haas. "What that does is it allows you not to wait until nine to make a call. We were doing the math, and we said if you are not waiting two hours a day to make free calls, that adds up to four years of your life you're saving by not waiting. So we said maybe that's the whole concept, which is 'waiting less.'"
To emphasize Sprint's tedium-avoiding concept, Goodby produced four amusing lessons in breezing through the most mundane of activities. These include how-to clips on quick-peeling an egg, turbo parking, instant shirt removal and speed-tying your shoelaces. "It's a series of pragmatic demonstrations of how to fast-forward through the boring parts of life," explains Haas. "We wanted to make it really useful and practical, so we went and did research and found all the things that people are using as kits of how to make things faster."
Fresh time savers come weekly, along with a Sprint-exclusive YouTube channel for users to provide their own videotaped ideas on how to avoid waiting. The best will make it onto the YouTube site and could be enhanced by Goodby production values, with the creators receiving credit and a t-shirt to boot.
One of the more interesting diversions on the official "Wait Less" site, though, is the "calculate your time" section, which lets you enter amount of time spent on any activity per day, week or month. A Moby look-alike then uses pink neon chalk to scrawl an equation onto a transparent board, which ultimately calculates the total time spent in your life on such an activity. Visitors can also use an automatic time-finder to compute time spent on more regular activities like eating, sleeping, laughing and driving.
Creativity News
Goodby Drops Waiting Tips
Gift Article
Gift Article.
10 Remaining
As a subscriber, you have 10 articles to gift each month. Gifting allows recipients to access the article for free.