TV commercial: Screening emotions

Teletext is getting all emotional. And not before time. The text-based TV information service is limbering up for the anticipated launch of digital TV later this year, which promises significantly expanded opportunities for information service providers like itself. So it's launched a pounds 5 million advertising campaign to create some emotional appeal.

There are seven new TV ads in all, each focusing on a particular state of mind ranging from Misery and Miffed to Glee and Far Out. In each, we see a neat little vignette depicting an emotion designed, the advertiser hopes, to strike a universal chord. A small child on a beach plays with a crab in the sea. The scene is curiously coloured - the sand seems extra- bleached, the sky especially blue and sounds echo more like memory than reality. "Jo ... Jo," her mother cries. The child responds with a tinkly laugh. The ad ends with the Teletext logo accompanying a simple sentiment: "We want to take you there."

In another, a boy stands at a bus stop in the pouring rain. Unlike the people around him, he has no mac or umbrella. At his feet, a pug dog shivers and shakes his sodden coat. The boy miserably looks at his watch. The endline? "We want to stop you being there." (If only he'd checked the weather on Teletext before venturing out ... You get the idea.) It seems curious it's taken Teletext a while to cotton on to the benefits of tapping into how we feel about holidaying, shopping, going out and the other activities covered by its services. It's an effective route already used by Yellow Pages, whose current campaign light-heartedly focuses on our changing demands on the directory through childhood, adolescence, marriage and fatherhood.

Teletext is taking things one step further with its claim that its information directly influences people's emotions - an approach perfectly in tune with the advertising agency behind it, St Luke's, which champions a touchy- feely approach. St Luke's recent commercial for Boots featured a naked girl in a giant fish tank (she's at ease with her body, you see). It also portrayed adults through children's eyes in its "Act your shoe size, not your age" campaign for Clarks. The agency is working on Teletext ads featuring selected holiday snaps of the staff. Touchy-feely, indeed.

Meg Carter