The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

I hate almost everything about it.

I appreciate it has some good points but I can’t help but feel it’s doing it’s best to destroy those too.

I wrote about much of this on my last visit there – however I’ve just heard that the ‘PR Grand Prix’ has been awarded to Australian Bank, NAB, for their ‘Break Up With The Banks’ stunt.

This was where they staged couples breaking up in restaurants on Valentine’s day and viraled the results.

No, I’m serious.

The justification for this campaign was that there was a perception in Australia that the big 4 banks were in cahoots and fixed charges … so what better way than to say/prove otherwise than to complicate a fairly simple message with a bit of contrived communication when all they had to do was change and uncomplicate their fee structure, stick to it and communicate it.

“But people don’t care/believe what their banks say and do”, I hear you say.

That’s right, and it’s because of bullshit stuff like this that is part of the cause.

“But lots of people talked about it and it achieved much more coverage than their media budget could of achieved on it’s own”, you retort.

Sure, but being talked about doesn’t automatically mean you’ve captured societies imagination, it can also mean people think you’re shit.

I talked about this campaign at Circus [admittedly after only seeing one of their billboards] and afterwards, someone from the NAB marketing team came up to me “to put me right”.

Standing 2 inches from my face, he said …

“The problem is you only saw one part of the campaign, so you don’t know the whole picture because if you did, you’d know that we are not like the other banks” … before proceeding to tell me in minute detail everything they’d done for the campaign.

I took this in for a few seconds before I said that as far as I knew, the Australian Government had not passed a law stating all its citizens must watch every piece of communication created as part of their advertising campaign and because of this, I’d possibly seen as much of the campaign as the average Australian punter. I also pointed out that even after he had told me what the campaign was about, I still had no desire to consider moving to them and if anything, it made me distrust them because a financial institution that thinks it’s a wise investment to fake relationship break ups in restaurants on Valentine’s Day is not the sort of company I want looking after my money.

He walked away.

When I look at what IDEO did for Bank of America and compare it to this shit, I shudder and the fact it got the Grand Prix at Cannes [albeit in the PR section] it makes me sick.

At a time where so many people think banks are arseholes – I find it amazing they used this approach for their communication. Don’t get me wrong, financial institutions don’t have to communicate like they all have the charisma of Keanu Reeves, but this sort of approach won’t change the way people think of them … fundamentally changing how they behave and operate will change the way people think of them.