EARLIER this month, an actress called Maureen Beattie from Britain's Royal National Theatre stood on the stage of the Lyric Theatre at the Academy for Performing Arts after a performance of Othello and pleaded with Hong Kong audiences to switch off their mobile phones. All week, continuous bleeping and trilling had interfered with Shakespeare's words - including the climactic death scene - and the thespian visitors were not impressed. This time next year, however, should any of those actors venture to return for the 1999 Arts Festival, they might well look back longingly on these halcyon days of relative silence.
The ownership of mobile phones in Hong Kong is rising at an extraordinary rate. There are currently about two million subscribers in the SAR; by the end of 1998, that figure is expected to reach almost three million. Hong Kong does not have the highest per capita ownership of mobile phones - that honour is thought to belong to Finland, for reasons which are not altogether clear beyond the fact that mobile phones are manufactured in that part of the world.
But it's generally accepted that Hong Kong is the world's most competitive mobile-phone market. It has 11 networks, seven operators and six new PCS (personal communication service) networks were launched last year. They all think it's good to talk - and the person they want to speak to is you.
For the advertising industry, this has proved to be a marvellous boon. 'This category has been the biggest spending one for the past two or three years,' observes Tom Kao, president, China and Hong Kong, of the agency BBDO. 'And it will be, by far, in the coming years. In the past six or seven years I've been working on mobile-phone accounts, and I know there is a strong affinity among male consumers. They pull out their mobile phones when they have dim sum or when they're in a bar and they'll compare features - they ask how good is your network, what services do you have, all that sort of thing. And every man will insist that he has the smallest one ... It's very, very competitive. For us, the attraction is doing advertising that really has an impact on your client, which is not always the case. For image awareness in telecommunications, advertising is everything.' Until last autumn, campaigns run by both operators (such as Hutchison and SmarTone) and manufacturers (such as Motorola and Ericsson) focused on celebrities. Leon Lai Ming, Aaron Kwok Fu-shing, Faye Wong Ching-man and Maggie Cheung Man-yuk all strutted their stuff, expensively and ultimately indistinguishably, so that the people of Hong Kong would be encouraged to go mobile. Then, on September 21, 1997, came a service called Sunday. It didn't use anyone famous.
It didn't even show people using telephones. It went in for highly questionable images, including a television commercial which lingered on a woman's breasts and one in which a man crossed Statue Square and noisily broke wind. Its early print campaign was banned on the MTR for being 'indecent'.
Letters of complaint ('tasteless, base and totally disgusting') were written to this newspaper. Ten days ago, the Broadcasting Authority cautioned ATV and TVB for showing the advertisement featuring the woman's breasts, about which it had received 57 complaints from viewers. Only five viewers took offence at the man breaking wind, however. 'We found it was within the boundary of good taste so we decided not to take further action,' ruled the authority's complaints committee chairman, Joyce Tai Poon Ching-sheung.
The current campaign features a cartoon character bobbing around the screen singing 'I don't want to grow up', which could be read as commentary on the more puerile aspects of Sunday's desire to get ahead in the market. But when you're a newcomer, jostling your way through an exceptionally crowded environment, you have to make an impression. From the day it received its licence, the company behind Sunday, Mandarin Communications, knew exactly how it was going to market itself so that it grew up very quickly indeed.
