I know what you’re thinkin. You’re thinkin you want your bank to stop listening to focus groups and its marketing department and to stop telling us stuff it thinks we want to hear.
You’re thinkin that the next time your bank raises interest rates by more than the Reserve Bank’s official 0.25 per cent, you’re going to walk into your local branch and dump a bag of horse manure in the revolving doors.
You’re thinkin that the ANZ recently spent $15 million to change its logos from three stripes to one stripe with a blue flower thrown in for good measure, and that Aussie Hollywood superstar Simon Baker can’t have come cheaply either.
You’re thinkin that it’s terribly presumptuous of a bank to assume what you’re thinkin, not to mention presumptuous of a journalist to presume to interpret your response to a bank ad, but you’re thinkin you’ll read to the end of this rant anyway.
You’re thinkin that a nice Catholic boy like Simon Baker who’s made it big in Hollywood might at least go to the effort or pronouncing the “g” at the end of the word “thinking”.
You’re also thinkin that he should ditch the American accent in this Australian ad. Granted, the bloke was recently named as having the best fake Yank accent of all the Aussies in Hollywood, but what part of “elitist blow-in” does ANZ’s marketing department fail to understand?
You’re thinkin that if you ever bump into an ANZ banker in the pub, you really are going to wee in their wine glass.
And you’re thinkin “Holy fake dialogue Batman! Did Simon Baker really just string four adjectives together ending in the suffix “ive” like some kind of jive-talkin urban poet?”
You’re thinkin, you couldn’t give a flying fully-franked fund whether your bank is interactive, predictive, non-restrictive, addictive, penetrative, demonstrative or friggin’ discombobulative.
You’re thinkin, you just want lower fees, that’s all. And the reason you want lower fees is so that you know the bank’s $5 billion annual profit is sourced from someone’s hard work, rather than a computer program which scrapes the bottom of your account like a syphilitic baboon scratching it’s enormous pink backside.
OK, so maybe you weren’t thinking that, but I bet you are now.
And you’re thinkin, I really don’t care if your bank is more creative, more innovative and more “in sync” with you. Because if you are even slightly in sync with those bastards in the most trivial way, well, that doesn’t say a hell of a lot about you, does it?
You’re thinkin, in general terms, why is it that bank after bank after bank spends big bucks trying to prove it’s more human than anyone else, instead of just talking straight, which you’d respect.
You’re thinkin, you don’t want a nanny, you want genuinely competitive financial products.
You’re thinkin, yep, you really would wee in a banker’s wine glass if you had the chance. In fact, you may crash the ANZ Christmas party this year.
If you’re a Simon Baker fan, no doubt you’re also thinkin, why do wealthy celebrities demean themselves with inappropriate ads? Why did Libby Trickett do that KFC ad? And what about Bear Grylls and his Nissan X-Trail ad?
If you just watched the Bear Grylls ad, you’re also no doubt thinkin: why do they always park at the edge of cliffs in 4x4 ads? What’s the message here? That the car’s handbrake works really, really well?
Lastly, you’re probably thinkin that the ANZ is quietly loving all of this, because any publicity is good publicity.
“They’re talkin about us,” the marketing department will be gleefully saying, deliberately dropping the “g” because a focus group told them that’s how real people talk.
“That was several squillion well spent.”
In a late development, Westpac - whose infamous banana smoothie campaign backfired spectacularly last year - is said to be courting a Hollywood star in an attempt to counter ANZ’s Simon Baker ads.
“We’re confident our Charlie Sheen ads will hit the right note,” a spokesman may well have just told The Punch.
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