The G in 3G stands for greed, apparently

Why I think my phone bill may be share-price sensitive. And why any hope of mobile data use is fanciful until the other networks follow 3's lead.

I just got a new 3G handset. More precisely, I just got an HSDPA 3G+ handset, which allows you to download data on the move at "blistering" near broadband speeds. Ever eager to conserve the WPP shilling, I duly returned the funny red data card I had used previously in my laptop. No point in Martin paying for both, I thought, what with the legal fees and CHI and all.

So I promptly asked the phone chappies here to switch on my data service on my handset, and set off for a week in a phoneless Cambridgeshire cottage. "It's £10 for the first Megabyte and £2 thereafter" Denise had told me as I left. "She must mean Gigabyte", I thought - after all, it can't cost £14 to download a single album track. Can it?

Apparently it can. One week's email in Cambridgeshire later and my phone bill was £1600.

I visited the Vodafone website. It seems I was lucky. Had I gone off for two weeks and to France - as originally planned - and been connected to a "non-Vodafone 3G partner network", I would have run up charges of £14,000. For the same volume of data my home broadband supplier would give me for £25. And which '3' would provide for £10.

Now what really irks me about this is that every month I am asked to attend a mobile advertising conference where lots and lots of extraordinarily bright people (quite a few of them part-paid for by my £1600) talk evangelistically about the great future of mobile - as a source of music, podcasts, rich media, immersive content, infosnacking.... you all know the kind of thing.

As well as being very bright, every attendee at these events has one other thing in common. Not one of them pays their own phone bill. Unsurprising, really, as that immersive user generated Youtube content may be a little less amusing when you're paying Vodafone £25 a pop for it.

People are not unreasonable. Just as with voice calls they will pay a premium for information on the move. But probably not 10,000%. 

So I shall happily attend the next mobile advertising event Vodafone invites me to. But for a speaker's fee of £1,000,000. Plus expenses. 

When was the last time you laughed at a print ad?

Not that peculiar, wry smile which adland normally takes as the sign of great humour in print. Not "Ah yes, very drole" humour. I mean real, uninhibited LOL or ROTFL laughter.

It has been a while. It may even have been 1989 when I saw The Economist's "Lonely at the top."

 But the recent campaign for a book of Mexican Wrestling photographs had me laughting till it hurt. I even showed them to my remarkably humourless wife (though, come to think of it, she had a great sense of humour when we first met) and she laughed too.

All four ads are glorious. You'll find them on page 6 (and 33) of the Campaign Press Awards book.

Most remarkable of all, I am just off to luchaloco.com to buy a copy of a book on Mexican Wrestlers. David Ogilvy may have been right when he said that "people don't buy from clowns". But then clowns aren't funny.