We've learned a lot about marketing from our friends at Procter & Gamble over the years.
As a Saatchi & Saatchi alumnus, I was brought up on many of the marketing principles of that great business. Many marketers talk about category leadership, but not all get to market with truly game-changing ideas.
P&G's outgoing chief executive, AG Lafley, puts his finger on the nub of the issue, with a book called The Game-changer. In a world where many markets are hurtling toward commoditisation, he argues, only the game-changing ideas will save the shareholders their shirts.
O2's ad is based on the insight that when you have children, your fridge becomes a visual metaphor for your family's school and social life - and the more children you have, the greater the fridge magnet-manage-ment required.
We see the Post-It notes, scribbled reminders, and birth-day party invitations being vacuumed up by a device that will text you, and anyone else in your family, when a task, errand or appointment is due. It is a simple product demonstration, executed with charm. The P&G client would certainly approve.
And the name? A Joggler. Even this is brilliant. It gets into your head until you figure out its meaning: a cross between the juggling of appointments and the jogging of memory, I finally reckoned, having spent a good few minutes pondering it even before the nice folk at Marketing asked me to.
As for the advertising, I have always had a soft spot for clients who under-stand that information goes in through the heart. There have been many noble attempts to capture the emotional high ground of life's most uplifting telephone conversations.
Yet my mobile phone-carrying lifetime has been signposted by marketing innovations. I've only had two mobile-phone providers: Orange, for its per-second billing, followed by Vodafone, because it delivered faultless coverage. I now have four children, and can't even see my fridge. I'm looking at my Vodafone contract even now, and my wife's, and the nanny's...
It is a brilliant innovation that will make a fortune for O2, and the agency delivers it simply without recourse to those bloody bubbles. The bubbles never really did it for me. But the Joggler? In short, it's a game-changer.