No Kudos For Koodo? | Koodo’s cellphone plan might be great, but are their ads making me hate my body?
Are you ready? Ready, that is, to deconstruct a cellphone ad that has been driving me buggy for months now? You see, I’ve been puzzled — maybe even losing a bit of sleep — trying to disentangle the layers of questions posed by Koodo’s wacky ’80s aerobics-themed advertising campaign.
Part of the challenge of even trying to unpack these ads is that they’re so over-the-top that they’re obviously not meant to be taken seriously. The campaign is smart precisely because it’s so cheesy. With their “so bad they’re good” aesthetic, the ads defy intellectual analysis in much the same deadpan way that Napoleon Dynamite does. You either love them or you hate them.
And God help you if you hate them, because Koodo’s ads are everywhere, from billboards to TV spots, from an extensive website to brightly coloured print ads right here in the pages of SEE Magazine. The ad accompanying this article is typical of the bunch: “Ready to go fat free?” asks a sticker designed to look like a food label. Typically such a proposition would be neither outlandish nor offensive. Devices or diets to shed those “excess” pounds appear in women’s magazines all the time, and anti-fat discourse is a standard element of food commercials, fitness programs, and fashion photography.
To be truthful, I can’t say I don’t have my own body image baggage either. I’m exposed to as much popular culture as anybody, and popular culture dictates that fat is ugly — “fat” itself is an ugly-sounding word. The media constantly advocates a very specific, generally unattainable and unmaintainable slim body type. It’s understandable, then, that the promise of looking “better” would appeal to a lot of folks. I’m sure I’m also not the only person who feels uneasy about the way “thinness” and “fitness” tend to be conflated, packaged, marketed, and sold together, to the point where “fatness” becomes unthinkingly associated exclusively with negative values — ugliness, unhealthiness, undesirability.
What does all this have to do with Koodo’s campy ads? Hang on — I’m getting there. So: here we have a pay-as-you-go cellphone plan. Basically, under the plan, you don’t have to pay for the things you don’t want. From what I can tell, it’s the equivalent of the $15 Virgin phone I recently bought to use in the U.S. — Virgin phones have a built in SIM card so you have to use a Virgin plan with a Virgin phone. It’s a good deal; I feel in control of my cellphone plan! Control: what a delicious feeling — and in their ads, Koodo promises you control over that which is undesirable and excessive. It cuts out the fat from other cell plans. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
... And yet I’m so confused. Koodo is exploiting the media’s obsession with all things “fat-free” while simultaneously spoofing American Apparel’s quasi-pornographic advertisements, sending up the ’80s aerobics craze in a fun and silly way, and cleverly twisting anti-fat slogans so that they apply to mobile phones.
Weird. It’s just so weird. There are so many conflicting ideologies contained in these harmonious-looking ads that I’m offended and impressed all at once. I simply can’t reconcile it in my brain, and they’ve been stuck inside there for months now. Maybe I need to go somewhere and clear my head — someplace where I don’t have to think for a change. Luckily, I’m currently residing in a gorgeous box canyon. I’ll just go enjoy the absence of billboards, stare at the perfect mountains that surround me ... and turn my cellphone off.
