We feared it could happen. And it has. Leo Burnett/Chicago has bombed yet again in the banking category. What seems like only days (even though it has been years) after Burnett produced some bad advertising for the now defunct Washington Mutual bank, the ad agency has introduced a campaign for new client Fifth Third Bank that is as bad.
Worse actually. Because there is no excuse this time. Burnett’s bonkers bankers (often seen in-a-holding pen) advertising for WaMu was a total embarrassment. Everyone knew that to be the case, even as Burnett was desperately trying to match the WaMu brand of banking with a style of advertising it believed to be in synch.
But the advertising was silly, if not downright stupid. And it in no way suggested WaMu was a bank with which anyone wanted to do business. We still suspect most people, when it comes to selecting a bank, would much rather it be an institution that is more conventional, rather than less.
Anyway, WaMu is long gone. It took years for Burnett to find another bank to fiddle with. And when the ad agency abruptly turned up with Fifth Third, we were immediately suspicious about how it landed at Burnett.
Now that the first campaign from Burnett has debuted, we know our suspicions were justified.
Mind-boggling new campaign tag line
Burnett has dubbed Cincinnati-based Fifth Third “the curious bank.” That’s right. Take a moment to let that tag line sink in, please. We’ve been thinking about it for a while, and the line strikes us as mind-bogglingly inappropriate.
But more mind-boggling than anything else.
One can parse “the curious bank” several ways, which creates an immediate sense of confusion — certainly not what we want in a bank. Is this a bank that is curious, as in weird? Or is this a financial institution that wonders about a lot of things?
Or is it some combination of both? Who knows? But we do know a tag line should be very clear in the statement it makes about a company.
This one most assuredly is not. And that’s a big problem for Fifth Third that should have been handled before now.
What’s worse though, is that it appears, based on an examination of one of the first Fifth Third print ads (we haven’t seen the TV work), Burnett has not been able to divorce itself from the troubling creative concept of unconventionality as it relates to banks. At least that looks to be the message that is struggling to break through in the wan print ad we are now staring at — in near total disbelief.
Fails to connect brand with consumer
The theme of unconventionality is invoked in the headline and carries right through the few graphs of ad copy. “Why is there a person in the place where the logo should be?” asks the headline, referring to a small, nondescript headshot of a smiling woman in the ad’s lower right-hand corner.
Then the first line of ad copy answers the question with that most flip and unsatisfying of answers “Well, why not?”
And so the thematic chord is struck.
This Fifth Third ad (and the institution itself) is out to peg itself as unconventional by eschewing something as traditional as a corporate logo and replacing it with something as unconventional (really?) as a photo of a Firth Third banker.
Well, earth to Burnett and Fifth Third Bank. There is a reason companies like to prominently display their logos in advertising. It helps ever so much to connect advertising to the brand in a consumer’s mind. It’s not a notion that only just surfaced in the craft and art of advertising for no reason.
But the Fifth Third ad copy then segues rather awkwardly from talking about dispensing with corporate logos to discussing how curious Fifth Third bankers are. Curious as in wanting to get to know their customers and their financial needs.
There’s subtle whiff of the perverse about the whole idea being posited here. But that aside, is it curiosity that bonds banker to customer? We think not. It’s competency and service and product offerings. Plan and simple. Still this Fifth Third ad tries ever so hopelessly to make curiosity a valid part of the equation.
The copywriter(s) who toiled over this ad and this campaign theme obviously struggled mightily to make sense of “the curious bank” and come up with ad copy that holds together. But the sad fact is they haven’t been able to.
In announcing the new campaign, Fifth Third executives said, among other things, they needed unconventional advertising because the bank has a strange name. We’ll grant them that. The bank’s name isn’t the most felicitous. But that’s not a good enough excuse for foisting advertising this feeble and misguided on a public that might overlook the bank’s strange name, if it is indeed an institution that serves them well.
So please. Rethink this effort now, before real damage is done.
Contact Lewis Lazare at LewisL3@aol.com
