Advertising: We've seen it all before

Absolutely everyone's talking about it. All human life is there. Black blokes and white blokes, men-people and women-people. They're all riveted by a Michael Owen goal. Hutchison 3G's big idea for its 60-second ad selling the new "3" video phones is ... football.

Football 2003 is what sociologists should call false community – meaning it's ideally suited to advertising, sponsorship and media brokerage generally. Because, increasingly, that's where it exists – in a media country of the mind somewhere between Baddiel and Skinner and Walkers Crisps.

In the Brixton barbershop they're re-running that goal. Then there are these blokes talking it through in a caff, see, with the salt and pepper as the players. There's a woman manicurist explaining it to her colleagues, moving the nail varnish bottles around. Then she enthuses about Michael Owen's thighs – the men don't do that. And there's a dad talking the epic moment through with his baby. They've got to fill those 60 seconds, you see.

There's a grossly defamatory caricature Sloane, a big man in a striped suit – a very poor person's Nicholas Soames – who says, "You're talking about rugby, ya." He's the only character who's missed this human wave of righteous feeling. (Sloanes have feelings, too, you know – and, anyway, they're all trying desperately to be geezers, so of course they're on to soccer talk in mixed company.) At various points, people do those exultant gestures they've seen other people do on TV – the air-punching "yes", the mocking shimmy, all that stuff.

The point is that you can watch Premiership goals on Hutchison mobiles now. It's given you the video phone products earlier than the competition, and it needs to sell them very hard. Pre-order now only on "3".

The other 10-second commercials in the campaign are all short visual gags involving some kind of leering head with a funny message: the girlfriend in the bath who's lost the soap and wants you round there right now to find it; the colleague who's shaved his head to a Mr T mohican to celebrate closing that sale; the girl eating a sticky sandwich who's asking after your diet. Things to make and do. And they're 10 times more inventive and compelling than the football set-piece. I'd love to know if an endlessly replayed goal proves a clincher. You'll have seen it on Sky and everywhere else if you're that type of person. And it's on a screen just a few inches square, meaning that Michael O, never a giant, will be a quarter inch, tops.

peter@sru.co.uk