[danbruc]

Especially given, as a look at the history of mobile phones [1] reveals, that AT&T pioneered commercial mobile phone calls in 1949, 45 years before this ad campaign. The idea of videotelephony came up in 1878 and Germany had an experimental public video telephone service in 1936, AT&T had the Picturephone in 1964. [2] Add to this that mobile audio and video calls have been depicted in science fiction for a long time.

Whatever made them pick land line phones over mobile phones for video calls, it probably was more like an oversight or they estimated a longer time horizon for widespread adoption, it certainly was nothing they could not have imagined. Maybe it was even something trivial like easier visualization in the ad.

Thinking about this also reminded me of the 2005 movie »The Island« [3] which also feature video call telephone booths and I have this vague feeling that [video call] telephone booths are generally quite common in science fiction movies. But that might just be because you don't have to explain how someone obtained a mobile phone after he just escaped a situation where he lost all personal items.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film)