| All That and a Good Advertising Campaign Too? |
[Nov. 30th, 2005|01:19 pm] |
It's hard to underestimate the value of a good advertising campaign. Take citibank for instance. You know their ads. They're the plain little billboards with wry little aphorisms on them, espousing family centrered sentiments with witty new phrases. I pass three of them on my way to work. They say things like, "Be the last to leave and the first to arrive [home]," and "May your next promotion be World's Best Dad."
The ads are good ones. They're visually attractive because of their excellent use of large swaths of bright white negative space and their simple, stylish message. In a world that is constantly trying to communicate with us it's downright relaxing to see an ad that's as uncomplicated and as easy on the eyes as citibank's are. And their message is amusing as well. I think my favorite one was, "If you had all the money in the world, the rest of us would use something else." It's nice to read something like that; it's imaginative and funny.
And that's what, in my mind, makes them so subversive: their apparent innocence. The implications of the ads are twofold. The first is in the presentation. Simple, uncomplicated, easy, which is nothing like the ads I see for other banks, Wells Fargo and Bank of the West, whose imagery tends towards stage coaches and grizzly bears, evoking a picture of a far more blatantly fictional West that does not exist now, if it every did at all. Citibank emphasizes the ease of the process by proxy through their ads, rather than attempt to evoke the spiritual nature of its banks through the crude tools of symbol and association like Wells Fargo and Bank of the West who want us to believe that their banks are rugged, strong, and dependable. Mascots are for sports teams; citibank's about the process by proxy.
The other unusual movement in the ads is their portrayal of the consumer as greedy. Where most ads seek to portray the consumer as the middle American striving to turn their dreams into reality through hard work and earnest application of talents and abilities, citibank has opted for a smirk and a guilty nod, creating a moment of vulnerability by encouraging each of us to admit that, despite our knowing better, money really is too important in our lives. Each of the ads highlights a "negative" aspect of our lives that has to do with money; pinching pennies, all the money in the world, and in my least favorite "It turns out materialism is, well, immaterial." The subtle implication of these ads is that we're the ones with these beliefs, and thefore, by the nature of the vehicle of this message, an advertisement, the business sponsoring the advertisement will have a solution for our problem. Thus citibank has positioned itself as the fatherly advisor full of homespun wit and wisdom, waiting patiently for us to see the error of our ways and come to him for help. Ward Cleaver with his cell phone clipped to his hip, and an ipod in his beemer.
The truth of the matter is less simple, and much less reassuring. Citibank isn't a person. It's a corporation, an agglomoration of businesses, bent on making money. In 2004 citibank made 47 million dollars...a day. It's the first bank in America to reach over 1 trillion (that's 10 hundred billion) in assests, the worlds largest financial services corporation, and competes with GE (another company whose quaint logo and old motto, "We bring good things to light" evokes a paternal and knowing fatherly figure)for the dubious honor of world's largest corporation. Citibank has also been repeatedly accused of predatory lending, also called loan sharking.
None of this is new information. We all know that banks, as institutions, are based on money, and it would be silly for us to believe that any bank, much less a bank as large and ambitious as Citi, would ever make something other than money their concern. It's why we continue to put our money in their institutions, because we know that money is their first priority. It's also why we choose not to judge greed and ambition too harshly in the people who run those banks, because their greed is good for our money, and our money is important to us.
Neither is blatant hypocrisy new to business or banking, not even hypocrisy in advertising. It is, more or less, expected. We're a callused public, whose energy is spent sifting through information, determining varying levels of veracity and deceit, and reshuffling the value of words and their meanings like 'value,' and 'grand opening.' There's nothing grand about the opening of a new Subway restaurant, like the sign says near the Embarcadero. The word has been sucked of its meaning by advertisers, and has already become vestigal, rarely applied to words and phrases outside of 'opening' or 'theft auto.'
So what really bothers me is that a large corporation would use an advertising campaign to mislead their customers? Well, it's the idea that a corporation as large as citibank would actively encourage its customers, new and old, to adopt a practice of financial unconcern when it continues to employ a practice of avarice and greed. What this amounts to, in my mind, is a squeezing every last penny out of people and then trying to convince them that it doesn't matter. It takes a lot of balls to do that, a lot of balls, an apathetic public, and a very good advertising campaign. |
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