Invisible Brand

Apparently not, according to Lucian Camp, who has been investigating the mysterious absence of

I've thought quite hard, and I can think of one: Privilege Insurance, and "You don't have to be posh to be privileged." And maybe a couple of the executions in Egg's "what's in it for me?" campaign, especially the not-hugely funny one about the football shirt. That's about it. About what? About the only current financial services advertising campaigns that feature mass market - or, let's face it, downmarket - people. There may well be some campaigns I've forgotten. I can't claim my research has been rigorous. But as far as I can remember, with those two exceptions (and anyway Egg have moved on now), all the current major campaigns that feature people at all feature comfortable, middle-class people.

LOSSES ON LEGS
In many parts of the market, there is an extremely simple and totally decisive reason for this. Whole swathes of the financial services industry just don't want downmarket customers. For the life, pensions, long-term savings and financial advice sectors, downmarket customers are just financial losses on legs. The maths makes no sense. A regulated sale takes dozens of man-hours and many thousands of pounds of cost. How long will it take to get that back when you're charging 11/2% on contributions of £50 a month?

If "downmarket" means "poor" (which, of course, it very often doesn't) then banks aren't very interested either. More than one big bank has been playing for some time with a segmented pricing model which aims to offer "discouraging" pricing to poor customers (in other words, charges that are so obviously excessive and unreasonable that the customers vote with their feet).

GENTILITY RULES
But there are plenty of sectors that are interested in downmarket customers - or where, at least, some players are interested in downmarket customers. Home and motor insurance is one. But you'd never know from the advertising, where all the major brands that show us customers' lifestyles show us a middle-class world of people-carriers and home offices.

The same is true of many players in savings, lending and cards. The lifestyles we see may be fairly contemporary, but below the surface the world that these people occupy is more than a little reminiscent of that vanished BBC Radio world of the 1950s - the world of the Home Service and the Light Programme. I don't suppose we really see a lot of pipe-smoking chaps in hounds'-tooth jackets with leather elbow patches, but it feels as if we do. Even if one of them is in fact Howard from the Halifax.

Even the best campaigns in the category don't escape this relentless middle-classness. Although, like everyone else I hadn't the faintest idea what they were advertising, I adored the Prudential's "Plan from the Pru" campaign. But, you have to say, it was awfully Home Service and not a little hounds'-tooth jacket. NatWest's "Another Way" campaign is about the most credible of the big banks, but a film about a photographer taking society portraits is about as street and dressed-down as it gets. Forgive me for the complex grammar of the rest of this sentence, but although I like "I like Standard Life" much better than a lot of people who really don't like "I like Standard Life", there's no denying that you don't see many Mirror and Sun readers and public-bar drinkers among the Standard Life-likers. The best campaign in financial services today is Nationwide's magnificent "Proud to be Different" campaign with the brilliant Mark Benton delivering one of the great acting performances of all time as the bank manager from hell. The campaign is so good (and Nationwide is such an important client) that it's almost impossible to criticise it. But if I allowed myself the teeniest of grumblettes, I'd say that the customers Mark terrorises are a miserable bunch of vacuous middle-class ciphers who aren't really worthy to be on the receiving end of such devastating venting of spleen.

MIDDLE CLASS SQUIRRELS
Of course many major advertisers don't actually confront us directly with pictures of their target groups at all. Some show us pictures of their staff, like Barclays. It doesn't really matter who these staff are: the campaign is still the greatest catastrophe in the sector since.well, since Barclays' last brand campaign. Some confuse us by showing us foreigners. (Well, actually, only HSBC did this, during their "world's local bank" phase.) Some don't show us people at all, like AXA, although one still has an inexplicable sense that if they did, they'd be middle-class people. And some show us animals, cartoon characters and suchlike instead of people, like Egg's current guinea pigs and Abbey's squirrel, but (you know where I'm going with this) they feel like very middle-class guinea pigs and squirrels. I'm not trying to be a snob, or an inverse snob, or a shop steward lobbying on behalf of working-class people looking for parts in financial television commercials, or anything else of a provocative or mischievous or controversial sort. (If I was trying to be any of the above I suspect I'd concentrate on rather trickier issues like representation of ethnic minorities in financial services TV advertising. And no, you can't count Samuel L Jackson.)

RASPBERRY TIME?
All I'm trying to say is that the endless and unbroken suburbanity of financial advertising (and indeed other forms of marketing communication - it's the same story in brochures and on websites) is one of the reasons why financial advertising and marketing communication all seems so incredibly samey. Or, to put the same point another way, there are so many sectors of the financial services market where breaking ranks with the middle-class majority would provide immense and immediate differentiation. In savings, in mortgages and lending, in insurance (despite Privilege), in cards, perhaps most obviously of all in health, I see huge opportunities for great big loud, proud, mass-market brands, blowing loud raspberries towards the twee legions of middle-class competitors and making contact with their marketplace with real gusto, energy and commitment. I'd love to do it. Any of you geezahs out there fancy giving it a go?