If you click on the link here, you will be able to access the various Orange brand campaigns by countries.

I quite like this new campaign just rolled out in France. It is (as it should be) a very interesting traduction of Orange's strategy. The vision behind it is well synthetized in the CEO's new book. Indeed, in the meantime, I have read Didier Lombard's book: "Le Village Numrique mondial. La deuxime vie des rseaux" (published by Edile Jacob). Not sure if it has been translated in English yet but anyway the title would be more or less: "The global digital village / the second life of networks".

There are plenty of anecdots. Excellent food for thought as well.

Anyway, it made me think of additonal issues:

– after a range of acquisitions (from Amena in Spain to the recent rebranding of One in Austria), it is the right time to have a global brand campaign. Orange has roughly 115M customers under the Orange brand vs a total of 170M.

– Few global operators have launched such worldwide ad campaigns to the execption of Vodafone with the "make the most of now" tagline. I think we will see more of those (T-Mobile, Telefonica?) moving forward since operators do not only compete with each other but also with the likes of Nokia (one of the most valuable brands worldwide) and with Internet giants who drive huge worldwide audiences.

– Consumers (and in particular digital natives) increasingly produce content (so called UGC) and interact via social networking tools. They engage with various brands and communities. The launch of Orange Photo, the announcement that a service would aggregate all its social networking partners into a single destination (Orange World) are part of this larger trend (interestingly all those services as well as T-Mobile MyFaves or Vodafone my communities are provided by a white-label provider named Newbay). It reflects the fight on the social adress book between various stakeholders. It could work well if operators learn to work the way Internet players do, federating community of developpers and providing APIs and SDKs.

Updated: Didier Lombard was in SF to sign his book (the second life of networks) a few months ago. Thanks Stphane for the tip. It actually reminds me of his quote that FT was not building "freeways for Californian cars" (meaning networks to be leveraged by the likes of Google, with a shift of revenue/value from Europe to the US).