Invisible Brand

How will the era of the credit crunch affect financial advertising, asks Paul Gordon. Will the hair shirt replace Howard’s Hawaiian variety?

Here’s a good laugh. Go onto the website of any big mortgage lender, and use the search facility to try to find the words “credit crunch”. Even without doing it, you can guess what comes back: “’credit crunch’ not found.”

They’ve got to be kidding, right? ‘credit crunch’ not found? It’s only the biggest thing that’s happened in the mortgage market for generations. It’s only transformed the businesses of the lenders themselves, and of mortgage intermediaries, and hundreds of thousands of other people and businesses inextricably involved with the property market. It’s only destroyed the last (and biggest) bastion of positive consumer attitudes towards long-term investment. And it’s only changed the financial climate, and the financial outlook, for tens of millions of property owners. “’credit crunch’ not found”? What planet are they on?

In truth, though, it’s all very well being amused and amazed. The fact is, it’s part of a familiar pattern. As I’ve said before in the Invisible Brand, the financial services industry has never been good at producing communications that connect to current events. Imagine trying, for example, to plot the rises and falls of equity markets from the content or tone of investment advertising. Most of the time you’d get no feel for the markets at all. Only in the bleakest periods would you find a sudden switch to messages about “cautious” funds, and the appearance of the code words “uncertain” and “volatile”. (Both of these words mean “falling”, as in the sentence “that parachutist who just jumped out of that aeroplane is looking very volatile”.)

What’s perhaps a different and more interesting question is the extent to which financial advertising does in fact reflect the climate at a higher and more general level. As clouds gather, will we find that financial advertising as a whole becomes less upbeat, more serious, more restrained? Or perhaps just the opposite, seeking to counterbalance the anxious mood with unrestrained frivolity? Or unaffected one way or the other?

In the marketing media at the moment, the general assumption seems to be that this is no time for fun, or for singing or dancing. Halifax’s recent agency review is widely thought to have been triggered by a feeling that the musical extravaganzas featuring Howard and his staff-member chums are out of tune with the spirit of the age, although I can’t help thinking that if the issue was as simple as that then DLKW would have had an opportunity to come up with a new approach without a bunch of other agencies being invited to take part in the proceedings. And our own clients at Nationwide are asked at tiresomely frequent intervals whether they intend to replace their brilliantly funny Mark Benton campaign with something, well, you know, more serious. (Of course, the short answer to this, as all sorts of great comedians from Woody Allen to Lenny Bruce to Rory Bremner would undoubtedly agree, is that when it comes to being serious, there are few techniques more effective than comedy.)

But what is the right tone of voice for financial advertising in stormy weather? One big point is obvious: as far as product focus and propositions are concerned, that great heavy pendulum that drives and shapes the entire market has started its long journey from the side marked GREED to the side marked FEAR. In one way or another, advertisers will encourage us to hang on to what we’ve got, to strengthen our defences against misfortune, to avoid unnecessary risk.

Part of this is that borrowing is incredibly out, and saving is incredibly in, although it’s difficult to say whether this is driven mainly by recognition of a change in consumers’ priorities, or by the need on the part of all sorts of storm-battered lenders to repair their battered balance sheets.

Changes like these, mainly affecting products and propositions, are undoubtedly significant in themselves – welcome in themselves too, if they mean fewer calls from developing-world call centres from people desperate to encourage us to increase our MBNA card borrowing limits.

But is there more to it than this? In a harsh climate, does the whole tonality of financial advertising need to change? Looking back at the best financial campaign of the last 50 years, Tony Brignull’s Albany Life ads from the early- to mid-80s, it’s striking how many of the subjects that appeared in the first couple of years, during the catastrophic recession of the early Thatcher era, strike a deeply pessimistic note. “The Push”, says one headline, alongside a picture of pinstriped executives falling like dominoes. “What to do if it gets round to you.” Another shows the menial jobs offered to an unemployed company director – milkman, waiter, dustman, advertising account executive and so on. (That was a joke about the account executive.)

But in the early 80s, the climate had deteriorated a good deal further than it has today. Unemployment was up to 3 million and rising. Interest rates and inflation were much higher. The British manufacturing industry, in particular, was packing up and shutting down before our very eyes. The level of personal anxiety about the immediate future – next week, next month – was stratospherically high.

Today, the level of personal anxiety is certainly high and still rising, but it seems to me that on the whole it’s focused more on the longer term than on the immediate outlook. People are gradually realising the extent to which the responsibility for their own long-term financial wellbeing, and their family’s, has been dumped back onto their shoulders by government, and by employers, no longer willing to take these risks on individuals’ behalf.

As a result, I think that the big change we may see in the tonality of advertising may be away from an emphasis on immediate gratification, and towards the deferred variety. Recently, experts have often said that this is stony ground for advertisers, and that people want their jam today, not tomorrow. But in our lives as a whole, most of us invest huge amounts of time, money, love and commitment in projects of one sort or another that will pay off, if at all, in the long run and not the short run. True, in a time of consumption frenzy, it may be easier to offer consumers the pleasures of a quick-win, spending-driven sugar rush. But as the greed-to-fear pendulum continues along its current trajectory, I suspect we’ll see more financial brands, products and campaigns seeking to connect with people’s longer-term hopes, fears and dreams.