Video: Three’s Moonwalking Shetland Pony

A beautiful Shetland pony moonwalks across a pretty rural landscape as Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Everywhere’ pumps out in the background. On paper, it is a tough sell as an ad pitch. But the charming new clip for Three, which sees a diminutive horse called Socks cutting some impressive moves across the dramatic Shetland landscape, could be set to score the UK mobile phone and broadband provider an online viral hit (with almost a million and a half YouTube views).

As the jaunty clip unfolds, it’s refreshing to see a happy horse in its natural environs – albeit with some CGI trickery – and not, as the recent depressing headlines have so kindly told us, in a budget frozen lasagne somewhere.

The second star of the clip, of course, is Shetland itself. The sweeping long-shots of the cliffs at Eshaness are spectacular, and perhaps unwittingly serve as a neat promo taster for BBC One’s new two-part crime drama ‘Shetland’ starring Douglas Henshall, which starts next Sunday 10 March.

And with one eye on tapping the sizeable marketing buzz that can be generated by a viral hit, the ad invites viewers to recreate their own mashups of Socks the pony at ponymixer.com, and share it through the social media with the #DancePonyDance hashtag.

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• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=588681280 Ben Makin

  We stayed at Eshaness in January and had to drive 15 miles / 25 minutes from the lighthouse to get enough signal to email documents. We got intermittant mobile signal a few hundred yards from the lighthouse. Awesome place.