Alltel Commercial Videos and Actors

The Videos

Food Court

This is my favorite Alltel commercial, because of the T-Mobile guy's comment, "as if anyone can have ten friends". The setting in a shopping mall food court is also perfect! They're lovable in a way. The Alltel guy, Chad, is actually a little boring compared to them.

Kidnapped

This is another popular one. Doesn't play as well because Chad dominates it. The Dungeon and Dragon's comment is a little over the top, straining to identify the teenagers as geeks.

Alltel Commercial Actors

Interesting, the actors in the commercials portray their characters pretty well as human beings so you do sort of feel sorry for them even though you're supposed to laugh at them (and then go out and buy Alltel phones).

Who knows, maybe they're once and future stars? You can find the names of the actors here.

"Analysis"

When you look at the old commercial, you see an interesting attempt at marketing based on making fun of their competing brands by portraying them as teenage losers. To the extent that they were trying to appeal to the hip young user, they may have worked to some extent. Some of them are still funny. Some immature humor is timeless.

These commercials highlighted the myCircle feature of Alltel's standard cell phone plans. This feature allowed you to call friends in your "circle" for free even if they were not Alltel customers. In contrast, the other companies allowed free calling only to selected people who were also their customers.

This Alltel feature isn't available on their pay-as-you-go plans. For example, on their Pay-per-Day plan, you can pick only one(!) number for unlimited mobile to mobile calling as one of your two free options. Similarly, on their Pay-per-Month plan, you can pay an extra $5 per month -- making it a circle of one (or two depending on how you picture the circle). Still it's useful if most of your calls are to one person.

The teenagers in the commercials are similar to the kind you see at Best Buy or Circuit City. They're similar to 40 Year Old Virgin movie which was based in one of these electronics stores. Maybe that's where they got the idea.

If there is another Alltel commercial you'd like to see, you can probably find it on YouTube, but the quality goes down from here. Many feature "Chad" as he confronts the other brand representatives or as he goes to the other company headquarters and tries to confront them as in a Michael Moore-style documentary. Not very convincing.

Ah well, when a company's more or less gone, all that's left are the commercials. So enjoy these and then pick a decent prepaid cell phone plan and get on with it.