Are irritating adverts the sole preserve of the banking industry? Certainly the banks seem very good at them.
The banks are frustratingly irritating at the best of times, but on the back of playing gay abandon with basic financial fundamentals and wreaking havoc on the wider economy which has adversely affected the lives of families up and down the country they are currently more unbearable than the prospect of being the person that has to tell Gordon Brown bad news.
So you’d think that the banks would be sensitive to the role that they’ve played in causing misery for an increasingly large section of the population and would be very careful in their advertising strategies. The evidence is that they have indeed thought about this and being the socially inept institutions that they are they have gone on the charm offensive unwittingly reinforcing their complete lack of charm as brands.
If I’d been advising them I’d have told them to just button it! People don’t want to be lied and partonised to like you’re some kind of mentally deficient individual. So, no – don’t spout rubbish about how nice you are, because you are not. Don’t think that smiling inanely will help – just think what you thought every time you saw Gordon Brown smile… (see the video below and search your feelings – what do you feel? Pity probably)
We think the same thoughts about you every time you run a completely insincere advert with a smiling actor, so please stop. Stick to the business of passing on Bank of England lending rates and not adding helpful £1 a day charges for using a pre-arranged overdraft facility. Yes, that’s £1 a day for being £10.01 overdrawn – a nice rate of interest I don’t think.
If there is a lesson here, then it is this: sometimes you really shouldn’t advertise. If you don’t have a good proposition then don’t waste everyone’s time and money.
Take your pick from any of these awful adverts. They all deserve every scathingly hateful remark they receive on YouTube, where they are published.
Watching Halifax staff pretend to run a radio station makes a welcome change from watching them pretend to run a f**king building society.
Never have I seen a more partonisingly painful, wooden and downright awful advert.
So, my advice to the banks. Please stop. You just remind us how much we hate you when you advertise. Keep this up and we might actually lobby for you to be broken up into smaller, less irritating institutions.
