From Vodafone to Iliad, Megan Gale and the challenge in Tlc on the terrain of memory

There is one detail in Iliad's new campaign with Megan Gale that probably explains more about the Italian telecommunications market than many quarterly reports. It is not the price of the offer. It is not the 'forever' evoked by the claim. It is not even the choice of the Australian model, the historical face of Vodafone in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is the fact that that ad generated a warning.

The case, at this point, can be read as a publicity skirmish or as a small essay on loyalty changes. Or even both, not alternatively. Speaking of loyalty, Iliad hits the nail on the head with the claim: 'Few things are forever: one of them is Iliad'. And in the ad it entrusts Megan Gale with the punchline: 'Like Iliad, there is only Iliad'. But right here, considering the Australian model's past as the iconic face of Vodafone adverts, one would think that the real message lies elsewhere. And that is that even images that seemed to be forever lodged in the commercial memory of Italians can change home. And in this case, the telephone company.

Fastweb+Vodafone, which today incorporates Vodafone Italia, noticed this immediately. In a cease-and-desist letter addressed to the managing director of Iliad Italia, Benedetto Levi, and later made known via X by Levi himself, it contests a campaign "deliberately and openly centred" on the evocative value of Megan Gale, a "strong face among Vodafone's target audience". It calls for the "immediate cessation of the dissemination" of the advertisement, considering it likely to generate "an undue and unjustified attachment" to Vodafone's brand notoriety.

This is where the commercial stops being just a commercial. Because Iliad, in choosing Megan Gale, inevitably ends up not just buying a testimonial. Rather, it is as if it goes on to reinterpret a national emotional archive. It takes a face that for many Italians belonged to a precise season - that of the desired mobile phones, of logos that became language, of the promise that mobile telephony was pure modernity - and shifts it into the present of the war to lower telecommunications tariffs, of blocked offers, of mistrust towards remodelling, a bitter battleground between consumers and telcos.

The campaign speaks of fidelity, but actually celebrates betrayal. A sweet, smiling, perfectly packaged betrayal. It is basically the emblem of the betrayal of the consumer who one day discovers he wants to change his habits. Iliad calls it conscious change. Fastweb+Vodafone reads it, in fact, as appropriation of memory. Both readings, in the end, work. And that is precisely why the advertising is striking.