This reads like something that Kibo would have produced in the early 1990s, but because it is in The Economist and for a serious company, I am presuming that some trendoid got paid vast sums for creating this drivel:

The Future? What Future?
I’m the Future! I’m ALWAYS ON!

Fifteen-year-old Olga is a Parisian high school student. She has five best friends she can’t get enough of, and not enough time in a day to share and discuss everything they’ve got going on. In order to stay connected to her peeps 24/7, Olga is ALWAYS ON. She has created a blog where she sends tons of snapshots, videos, hip new URLs and info about the latest gadgets. Through her smart phone and laptop, she is linked to all her friends, their friends, and their friends’ friends. Her blog has grown and morphed into a fascinating teenager’s guide to Paris which had over 40,000 visitors last month alone!

We at Alcatel-Lucent are thrilled…

Let’s see, my own reactions were approximately:

• Photos of 15-year-old girls in The Economist? That’s a turn-up for the books…
• …and with all the faux-realism of pictures clipped from a Flickr set originally taken by a stoned teenager.
• Love The Excessive CAPITALIZATION! And Emphasis!
• Not to MENTION the retro 1950s TONE of making COOL ASSERTIONS in that style.
• The bold blue text recalls hyperlinks, but you cannot click on paper…
• …so where is Olga’s blog URL?
• And how come I can imagine Mr Cholomondley-Warner reading this aloud?
• Or is this all totally fake, perhaps?
• “Olga is ALWAYS ON” – On what? And how? She is POWERED By Duracell, maybe?
• “hip new URLs”? Oy …
• “Peeps”? … veh.
• “Smart phone”? There is any other kind nowadays?
• Wait – since when is Olga a French name?
• And she had 40,000 visitors last month?
• Must be Googleable…

…and thus I stumbled across Olga, The Traveling Bra which is entirely nothing to do with the above, but which appears (from the front page, at least) to be amusing. Or faintly scary. Or both.

But Lucent, please! You’ve managed to pull off the advertising equivalent of the 50-year-old dad who dances awkwardly at his teenage daughter’s school disco, chugging Pepsi and wearing a baseball cap backwards to bond with “yoof”. The concepts described may be alien to 25% or more of The Economist readership, but that’s no reason to mash them up with stilted verbiage producing such manifestly artificial drivel.

It barely matters whether Olga exists, or is a figment of some copywriter’s imagination – I suspect the latter, mixed with stock photography – however if she is real, Lucent have demonstrated complete incomprehension of what she’s about.