Over the years, I’ve given banks a hard time.
Sure, they’re an easy target, but let’s be honest they’ve brought it on themselves.
Whether it’s their products … their service … or their ads … it seems that whenever they come to a junction, they always choose the wrong road to go down.
But recently I saw a bank ad that made me nod in approval.
No, seriously.
Sure, it’s not a great ad in terms of design or idea … but then, when you have something to say that is not the usual ambiguous bollocks that most financial audiences spout and you are saying it to a very specific audience, then it doesn’t have to be.
What am I talking about? This:
That ad was in a music industry magazine.
Now when most brands try and be ‘relevant’ to the medium they’re appearing in, they make terrible fucking puns or sad associations like this shit from currency.co.uk but Investec actually are speaking to musicians with something to say.
OK, so the whole ‘supporting talent’ headline is a bit shit and they still try to push their ‘wealth management’ bollocks, but I like that they’ve gone after a specific audience segment [musicians and writers] and their starting point in the copy is how they’ve helped many of these professionals over the years by advancing them cash against their future royalties.
Yes, I know that’s basically a ‘loan’, but I know from my past history that for many musicians and writers, that is huge news given many have to wait years to get their cash from publishers and record companies [Meatloaf took 20 years to get all his royalties from ‘Bat Out Of Hell’, resulting in him almost going bankrupt on 3 separate occasions] and often, few have the type of ‘traditional’ assets a bank will accept when granting a classic loan.
In other words, it’s an ad talking to musicians and writers saying something musicians and writers would actually want to hear.
Now compare that to what most financial organisations say and do and it’s a pleasant change … especially as their version of audience segmentation is either [1] rich folk [2] middle class folk or [3] business folk.
In a world where brands have replaced the quest for effectiveness with a desire to talk to ever increasing audience sizes, it’s little surprise we see more and more bland, meaningless messages being churned out for fear of ‘alienating’ a potential customer – even though 99.9% of these ads end up fading into the background quicker than a woman past her prime [ooooh!] – which is why there has never been a more important time to know who you really need to talk to … not just so you can design messages that have real value for that specific audience [which in turn has real value for the client] but because it’s so rare for brands to have a real POV these days, you might end up appealing to more people than you imagined, simply because it’s nice to have your brain engaged for once, rather than mushed.
So Investec, good on you, and I’m as shocked I’ve written that as I am sure you are.