Invisible Brand

Why can't I think of a single provider who makes us laugh?

If creative people in agencies could uninvent three famous sayings about writing and creativity, I reckon I know which three they’d choose.

Number one: “You can’t begin a sentence with the word ‘and.’” Number two: “A sentence has to have a verb in it.” And number three (from no less a source than the great David Ogilvy): “People don’t buy from clowns.”

The thing about these three sayings is that apart from being incredibly irritating and restrictive, they’re all completely wrong. Tell the authors of the King James Bible, for example, that you can’t begin a sentence with the word “and.” In the first book of Genesis, every single sentence bar two begins with the word “and.” And if that’s good enough for the Bible’s account of the creation of the world, it’s good enough for a trade press ad for a sub-prime mortgage.

Tell William Shakespeare, for example, that a sentence has to have a verb in it. “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Not many verbs there. “To sleep, perchance to dream.” No verbs there, except a couple of infinitives which don’t count.

And then there’s Mr Ogilvy. Mr Boring and Pompous Ogilvy. Mr Completely Wrong and Silly Mr Ogilvy. People don’t buy from clowns? You’re kidding. It often seems they don’t buy from anyone else.

In the case of McDonald’s, of course, people quite literally buy from a clown – the bizarre and in my view weird and scary Ronald is the way that children access the brand. Assuming, though, that what Mr O actually meant is that people are unpersuaded by funny advertising, it’s hard to imagine a saying that has been more frequently disproved. I can show you funny advertising dealing with pretty much every subject under the sun, even including such unlikely candidates as key battles of the first and second world wars (Stella and Carling), baldness (Hamlet), cruelty to animals (the hysterical Outpost.com) and even death (Sony and Xbox).

It has to be said, though, that there are still remarkably few examples of humour in financial advertising – and, what’s more, that the few examples of attempted humour are all too often about as funny as an attack of the flesh-eating hospital superbug.

I think I’d probably rather be infected with MRSA than have to watch elephant.co.uk commercials, which, in terms of their effect on my attitudes, succeed only in making me ponder sadly on the pitiful desperation of the actors agreeing to take part in this ghastly rigmarole.

And I’ve seen funnier bus tickets than the current Barclays campaign, in which miserably unamusing things happen to members of staff like golfballs flying into television screens. (This, astonishingly, from BBH, who I’m sure wouldn’t dream of doing anything so appalling in any other market.)

But still, it’s churlish to spend too much time sounding off about the failures, when the huge majority of financial commercials (and an even huger majority of financial press ads, and a majority of financial junk mail so huge that it’s pretty much the entire totality) plainly don’t want to have anything to do with humour, wit, amusement, drollery, fun, comedy or any of the other terms you’ll find under the heading of “humour” in the thesaurus.

Why? Well, mainly, it comes back to Mr Ogilvy. Over the years, people have gradually become comfortable with the idea that people do in fact buy chocolate bars and pints of lager and carbonated drinks from clowns, but there’s still an anxiety when it comes to serious, important stuff like financial services.

Except of course that many financial services aren’t actually serious and important stuff at all, or at least they’re not seen that way by consumers at the time they’re buying them. Going back – with gritted teeth – to elephant.co.uk for a moment, amidst the barren wastes of most direct insurance advertising, isn’t there room for even a single brand that genuinely makes us smile?

Or how about credit cards? Looking back into the past, we must pause to pay tribute to Egg, whose “Talk to the Glove” campaign made me laugh out loud; and to Barclaycard’s much-missed and magnificent Rowan Atkinson campaign (although, even then, remarking with regret that the humour remaining strictly confined within the TV campaign, never venturing out into print, mail or other media).

But turning back to the present – and bearing in mind that credit cards are said to be more or less the only category in financial services that do have the same sort of self-defining “badge” status as your choice of beer, car or clothing – why can’t I think of a single provider who makes us laugh? (I wonder how much of their gigantic direct marketing budgets MBNA and Capital One could save if they decided to charm and entertain us into choosing their products, rather than carrying on with the bludgeoning and manipulation?)

Then there’s banking. Not so long ago, First Direct was very, very funny – the Vic Reeves campaign, at its best, probably standing at the top of the pile. Now, Nationwide’s Mark Benton TV campaign is ten times funnier than everything else in financial services put together and, from all accounts, about ten times more successful: but hardly anyone seems to want to learn from this experience, and absolutely no-one – not even Nationwide themselves – seems to want to risk giving people a smile in any media beyond their TV and radio executions.

And beyond these mainstream and mass market categories, you’ll have to go a long way for even the faintest glimmer of a gag. In investments, well, some would say that Artemis’s “profit hunter” campaign occupies a space not a million miles from humour. In life and pensions, ten years ago Allied Dunbar’s “For the life you don’t yet know” was a miracle, funny, clever, brave, at times almost shocking and based on a great big real deep consumer insight that made you think again about the way you were leading your life at the same time that you were laughing.

But there’s never been anything else like it before or since.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten or omitted many notable examples: my apologies to all of them. Even so, my general point stands. Financial services is by far the biggest single advertising and communications category; it’s the one with by far the lowest proportion of funny communications, and with virtually none at all outside of television; and all the consumer research shows that it’s the least well-liked category and the least well-remembered.

I can’t produce a killer research finding showing the link between these observations. But I’m absolutely certain that there is one, all the same.