Eager Late Late toy show viewers will have seen the new 60-second spot that tries to give An Post a corporate image makeover. They should've got Trinny & Susannah.

The Javelin/Young & Rubicam ad reputed to have cost around 500,000 to create features faces and locales meant to represent "modern, multicultural Ireland", set to a funky Manfred Mann tune.

Publius watched this spot a couple of times . . . and with a 1m media buy, you'll be seeing it a few times yourself . . . and couldn't shake the impression that something wasn't quite right.

Not the script. Although the litany of what An Post have done for you lately is a bit awkward, the pacing is off, and the 'we're all connected' tagline doesn't rock our world.

It's the protagonist. An Post employs nearly 10,000 people. Yet not a single An Post employee is in the ad.

Just the glowing, ghostly, half-hidden, disembodied logo swooshing around the country. Strange, isn't it?

It's as if all these things can appear by magic. Undoubtedly many of them can, with very little human touch involved. But once its monopoly is gone, An Post is still going to have a high cost base . . . also known as unionised employees . . . which might compare unfavourably to future competitors.

In a world where dealing with a competent, syntactically smooth English-speaking human being in physical reality is an increasingly rare luxury for which many will pay a premium, shouldn't An Post have gone retro? No one will buy them as a hi-tech logistics outfit if their price of service is higher and speed is slower, and it's hard to see it being otherwise.

But enough people still want to feel warm fuzzies about the people who deliver the post that you'd think they'd want to make a virtue out of necessity and re-humanise the brand, rather than hide away the employees like servants you can pretend don't really exist.

TV3'S HAPPY DAYS

Doughty Hanson doubters will have to stay quiet a bit longer. Publius reckons, with help from informed sources, that they'll have to shut up for at least four years, now that TV3 has secured the crucial rights to Granada programming including Coronoation Street and I'm a Celebrity. . . The current contract has a year to run and TV3 will have the rights for another three. Given that Corrie is the station's biggest earner with advertisers, it's fierce good news for the station.

RUMOUR MILL

McDonald's finally moving its media business from Mediaworks to OMD, following a worldwide consolidation of the McDonald's media-buying business since 2004. Ireland was nearly the last market to fall in line.

One source speculates that the prospect of further pressure to regulate ads and promos aimed to get kids wanting high-salt, high-fat, highsugar foods has the fast food chain battening down the hatches.

MOBILE INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING

Just heard about blogs? Not sure what a podcast is? Bebo scares you?

Stop reading now before your head explodes. The Web2.0 Grand Unified Theory of Profitability is ad-driven social networking on mobiles. In two years by some counts the under-25s will be spending more time on mobile internet than on fixed-line broadband.

And as regular readers will know, the tipping point where TV audience evaporates and re-appears online has already been reached in the UK under-25 demographic. Ads follow eyeballs.

Context-appropriate ads on your mobile, pitching you services, restaurants or whatever, based on where your phone tells the network you are, where your mates are in relation to you and what boozer might be midway between you. Here already.

Google last year bought a mobile social networking service called Dodgeball (www. dodgeball. com) that will amongst other things alert you when a 'crush' of yours is within 10 blocks, and show you where your friends are on Google Maps. (Works really well in Manhattan; not so well in Laois, we think. ) MySpace already has a mobile version running.

Vodafone revealed last month that it's getting ready for a big social networking tie-in in early 2007. Last week Vodafone and Yahoo revealed that they're tying up to create advertising over mobiles in the UK that will use increasingly smart targeting as user data builds up, theoretically allowing ads to be more and more relevant to an individual user over time. Vodafone hasn't fastened on a partner in Ireland, yet.

Could be a good reason for Eircom to snap up that last 3G license after all . . . mobile social networking could be the mythical killer app that makes 3G worthwhile.

TIOCFAIDH AR TXT

Britain's Ofcom rapped digital channel MTV Dance for screening sectarian slogans in an August 4 programme.

The slogans were viewer-sent text messages scrolling at the bottom of the screen, including references to the UDA and that Fenians should die. Only the txt generation can't even get its slurs right: the message referred to 'Fenons'. The rebuke came despite a disclaimer that the messages were not necessarily the views of MTV.

HOLIDAY SEASON TIPS, BRIBES & ABUSE

all welcome on rdelevan@tribune. ie