Invisible Brand

In the investment funds market, says Lucian Camp, campaigns based on extended analogies are all the go at the moment. But will others follow where Artemis’s hunters lead? And if so, will they find what they’re looking for?

Of course I like to think that we develop a fair few of the opinion-leading, trend-setting, mould-breaking campaigns in financial services, but I must grudgingly admit that other agencies come up with the odd example from time to time.

You can tell when a campaign becomes a real trend-setter, because other clients just can’t help referring to it in their pitch briefs. Twenty-odd years ago, it was Direct Line’s little red telephone, created as I recall by Chris Wilkins in his time at BMP Business: for at least ten years, every client putting an account out to pitch in direct insurance, and quite a few in sectors far beyond, said they were looking for something similar.

Agencies came back with a ridiculous collection of green fax machines and yellow pillar boxes, most of which the clients treated with the contempt they deserved. In the Lombard Direct pitch, however, one agency in obvious despair couldn’t think of anything better than, well, a ridiculous crudely-animated blue telephone: I suspect they were as astounded as everyone else when Lombard Direct bought it.

More recently, another campaign which is gradually becoming almost as influential as Direct Line’s is RPM3’s for the investment house Artemis – you know, the one with the 30s pictures of the hunters tracking down profits.

I’ve always found it hard to be nice about this campaign, partly because I’ve never been a big fan of extended analogies but mainly, I suspect, because it trounced our own efforts in the same pitch. But while the rest of the industry has been gradually deciding that it loves it, I’ve been gradually deciding that at least I don’t really hate it as much as I thought I did. As extended analogies go, it does work pretty well. It’s carefully executed. It’s likely to appeal to a target market of 50+, middle-class men, both investors and advisers. And it is a good deal more interesting than most of the other campaigns in what’s currently a pretty grim category.

The first advertiser to look for something similar was probably Resolution Asset Management, who shrewdly went back to the same agency. This time RPM3 came up with an extended analogy around superheroes, creating a bunch of colour-coded caped crusaders to reflect Resolution’s somewhat complex multiple-boutique structure. At this stage, I can’t help thinking that while this is quite a lot like the Artemis campaign, it’s nothing like as good, partly because the superheroes are rather preposterous characters but more importantly because there doesn’t seem to be anything much for them to do in the ads. Whereas the Artemis hunters can peer through binoculars, examine footprints, raise rifles, paddle canoes and so forth, the Resolution superheroes seem mostly to stand with arms akimbo and leotards bulging in front of urban skylines. Still, maybe this approach will grow on me too.

Recently I’ve seen three more investment pitch briefs looking for Artemisesque solutions, and I think by the time you’ve reached a total of five you can say that you’re dealing with a genuine trend.

It remains to be seen whether these other organisations will end up with similarly high-testosterone extended analogies. (I wrote a somewhat mischievous piece on my blog saying perhaps rather than trying to out-testosterone the hunters and the superheroes, I’d like to see a fund manager adopt an extended analogy around, say, bin-men or school dinner ladies, but somehow I can’t really see it.)

But silly blog entries aside, if you are looking for a flexible, campaignable and above all visual approach to the advertising and marketing of investment funds, this kind of extended-analogy-based approach is proving an increasingly popular way of doing it.

The main alternative, as chance would have it, is still the Direct Line-style icon-driven campaign – Invesco Perpetual’s mountain, Investec’s zebra, New Star’s new star, Jupiter’s planet.

But in print-based communications, it’s awfully difficult to do much with an icon. On television, black horses, red telephones and Scottish Widows can trot, gallop or canter around our screens, very likely performing some kind of metaphorical actions relevant to the proposition. In print, the icons work perfectly well as low-key backgrounds to type-based ads, but as soon as you bring them to the fore they become a bit of a puzzle. Why that mountain, you ask yourself. Why the zebra?

This problem shouldn’t arise with the extended analogy, provided that you’re willing to pay for the production costs inherent in creating a lot of new visuals. You use the visual analogy to dramatise what you’re saying in the headline. True, this sometimes calls for a certain amount of contrivance – I think I’m right in saying that in order to create an ad focusing on their quantitative “smartGARP” process, Artemis were obliged to equip the hunters with a hunting dog of that name, which I think we can safely say is less common than Fido or Tyson. But, as I say, it does work.

So is this the future? Having had a year or two to get used to the extended-analogy approach, has the investment industry in its collective wisdom decided that the days of zebras, bulls and planets are over and that the days of rugged types seeking things of value (gold-miners? Explorers? Fruit farmers? Nerdy blokes with specs, pullovers and metal detectors?) have taken their place?

Personally, I’d like to think not. Although I expect we will see a few more campaigns of this sort, I don’t think it’s useful for any formulaic approach to advertising and marketing to become too widely established in a sector.

And in any case, as I mentioned, I’ve never been a tremendous believer in analogies at all. What you have to realise, I think, is that the analogy will always communicate far more about itself than it does about its real subject. Artemis’s campaign ultimately says “we’re kind of like a bunch of 1930s hunters with plus fours and a dog,” not “we have a quantitative screening system called smartGARP which helps us to identify stocks undervalued by the market.” Maybe this is OK. Maybe being like a bunch of 1930s hunters is a more interesting and potent idea than having a special screening system. But if a fund group really wants to communicate anything about what it does and how it does it, then an extended analogy is most unlikely to be the best approach.

I still live in hope that a major fund group addressing intermediaries and relatively knowledgeable consumers will be willing to invest some effort and money in a campaign that tries to communicate interestingly, visually and intelligently about how it actually goes about investing the money.

It’s over ten years now since I was involved in a serious attempt at this sort of thing, the Henderson Catalogue: this didn’t become much of a trend-setter, mainly I think because it was too hard and too expensive to do well, but among older hands in the business it’s still remembered surprisingly fondly. (Incidentally, one person who certainly remembers it fondly was our client at Henderson at the time, the delightful and indeed inspirational Avril Ellis – yes, that’s right, the same Avril Ellis who’s now head of account management here at cchm:ping.)

We’re a client-focused business. If you’d like an icon like the zebra, or an analogy like the hunters, or even a silly analogy like the bin-men, we’ll gladly have a crack at it. In much the same way that no-one has ever out-red-telephoned Direct Line’s red telephone, though, I suspect that the best creative solutions won’t come from following the paths of others.