Edgy campaigns can sometimes work well for non-edgy brands like banks, but beware the risks, writes Faris Yakob.
When we were briefly in London Rosie spotted a billboard. She sent it to me because it seemed like it had been ‘vandalized’ in a Banksy-esque manner, a street artist who we, like many others around the world, adore. It says the word EDGE and then has ‘spray painted street writing and silhouettes’ painted over it to say “Wedgey” with two figures crouching at the corner. The visual style is very characteristic of certain kinds of billboard interventions made by artists over the years, which is partially why this is interesting to me.
Image: Santander/Jelly
One of my first published pieces about advertising was in the Financial Times in a now defunct section called ‘Creative Business’. My partner and I wrote a piece called “Brandalism” that attempted to understand some of the billboard interventions artists were making. It was 2004 and culture jamming was all the rage, No Logo having come out a few years earlier. A young artist, later to become a Youtube legend, called Casey Niestat had gone around painting “iPod’s unreplaceable battery last only 18 months” on Apple’s new much-lauded, Magritte-inspired launch posters in New York City. At the time we wrote that “brandalism is an expression of a consumer’s frustration that a brand’s promise has no relationship to its behavior”.
One of modern capitalism’s most defining features is how it folds in and monetizes any form of counter culture or dissent. So it was perhaps inevitable, since Banksy has always outright refused any brand deal, that advertising would simply absorb culture jamming into its lexicon. The current Santander campaign launch film is a fake news bulletin about the ‘edgiest ad campaign in years’ featuring newsreader Jon Snow talking about the new Santander campaign, which it is also part of. In the spot, in order to create awareness of the new Edge account they project the logo onto the White Cliffs of Dover (the biggest edge in the country). However, there is a rival bank called Antandec (run by TV presenters Ant and Dec) who have been brandalising the work all around the country. Hence the billboards feature street writing around the Edge logo saying other words like “Wedgey” and “SausEdge”. It’s all fun, if thinly layered, postmodern advertising about advertising, developed by the agency known as House 337 (created through a merger of what was WCRS, then Engine group, with an agency called ODD).
I was particularly piqued to investigate this for a personal reason I will come to in a minute. I tried to work out what the Edge account actually was, because the advertising doesn’t really make the proposition of the product very clear. It appears to be a bundle of budget planning and money management tools with a current account that has both an associated rewards and (capped) cash back program and a savings account offering 4% but only up to balances of 4000 GBP. According to the website “the account has been specifically developed to support customers with today’s economic and social context in mind”, based on extensive customer research.
Now, back to me. Way back in the before-times, which I currently pin to pre-2008, I worked on a bank client developing a new savings account proposition. Iceland had very high interest rates for various reasons that had developed into a global ‘carry trade,’ where banks could borrow money very cheaply in Japan for example and then get a very nice return on it, essentially risk free.
At the time, my client was the biggest bank in Iceland, Kaupthing, and they had acquired a UK based investment bank. Together they noticed their biggest rival Landsbanki had just successfully launched a UK based high interest saving account leveraging interest rates arbitrage and had pulled in a lot of liquidity. So they brought the idea to us and we named it and branded and launched it. I did the brand planning and the naming workshops, producing the final recommendations with my team. The name we landed upon? Kaupthing Edge, because it gave you the edge when investing, as it offered more interest (it was about 6-7%). Simple, really.
It worked really well until the before-times ended and the global financial crisis destabilized the market and Iceland went bankrupt because it is very small and was massively over-leveraged. The banks were all nationalized to try to clean up the mess and some of our clients went to jail– Iceland is the only place in the world that happened. I don’t feel as bad as I could about this because our client had acquired local banks so all deposits were insured by the local governments. Landsbanki had structured their loans entirely through Iceland and so the UK government had to leverage ‘anti-terrorism legislation’ to settle the whole thing with them. Their promises, or promissory notes if you will, were not matched by their behavior.
I am in no way saying, in case this isn’t clear, that the name is a derivative concept. That’s silly (even though ODD were, oddly enough, design partners of Naked at the time). I assume there are Edge accounts all over the world because the conceptual ladder is obvious and thus will be generated again and again through the same processes that agencies use all over. So it goes.
This is why Douglas Holt & Doug Cameron suggest in Cultural Strategy that a propositional ladder can be a dead end, because it so often leads to the same places. They recommend tapping into cultural propositions that may have broader and yet also more specific scope for a market, which is what I suppose the Banksy, Jon Snow (you know nothing!), and Antandec elements are doing. I get the creative communications insight that an Edge account could have an edgy campaign. It also doesn’t make any particular claims it can be held up against. That can be a problem as Nationwide found out to its displeasure when it claimed to not be closing branches (they had closed 20% of their branches in the years leading up to the relaunch, according to the ASA ruling).
Will Santander become an edgy brand? No (especially considering they just got hacked, which is unfortunate timing) Banks have to transmit trust as strongly as possible, hence they outsource the risky behavior to the ‘rival’ bank in the work. As I discovered working with banks however, some of their risky behavior is very hard for anyone to perceive, let alone advertising agencies. Since so many people working in the industry did not work through the last financial crisis, I hope there is enough experience left for us to weather the inevitable fallout of the current YOLO economy.
Way back then, I also worked on the rebrand of Abbey National into ‘Abbey’ alongside various other agencies claiming to ‘turn banking on its head’. However, the products didn’t really support this positioning, and in 2007 Abbey had to admit that errors it made in the 80s led to many borrowers' mortgage terms being extended by up to 15 years on variable interest rates without their knowledge. The Ombudsman stated Abbey customers might be eligible for compensation and then 2008 happened and when the dust cleared Abbey was Santander, which seemed to be the end of it. When distressed banks get sold off during panics the acquiring banks often refuse to take on certain liabilities as terms of the firesale. So it goes. Perhaps the line about turning banking on its head was more prescient than I envisaged.
