This commercial for an investment house is really quite funny in a number of ways, one of them being the fact that it suggests criminal fraud, and shows someone getting away with it, all while linking the name of their investment firm with such actions. It’s a cute visual metaphor for their headline regarding a missing piece, but otherwise it’s really an ill-advised stab at communicating misguided messaging, in my opinion. I get the idea of the missing piece and all, but this isn’t the best way to communicate it in an investment context, if you ask me.
I saw this ad a couple of times, and I sat in slack-jawed amazement at the suggested undercurrent of the behavior in it. I don’t remember what the name of the business was, basically because I was so surprised at what was happening, and that anyone would want to advertise an investment house this way. I’ve looked for it again for over a week, and I haven’t seen it again, so I’m afraid I can’t even say who it’s an ad for. But if you see it, you’ll be sure to recognize it!
So here’s what this ad does: It shows a housekeeper hearing something alarming, and it turns out to be a rich woman breaking an expensive plate with a hammer. Then the rich lady takes a little piece out of the pile of broken plate shards, and she hot-foots it over to a museum, where she takes her piece of rubbish and sticks it on some priceless mosaic, filling a small gap in one little area of it, which ends up being part of the iris of the woman who is the subject of the mosaic’s image. Then they ask if you’re missing an important piece of your investment portfolio, yadda yadda.
So there are some obvious problems with this scenario. First of all, the rich lady is smashing valuable pieces of china, and that’s destroying an investment right there. Then there is the problem that she just leaves the smashed shards of plate all over her dining room table for the housekeeper to have to clean up. That’s just rude, and I’ll bet she’s just going to blame the broken plate on the housekeeper to get her fired, and that’s just horrible (especially in this job market)! But she’s just getting started, for after that she takes a shard of her broken plate and then, after subverting the museum’s security, she breaks the rules about not touching the artwork, and she fraudulently adds it to a valuable masterpiece in the museum’s exhibited collection, vandalizing it! Perhaps she works for the museum, and in some underhanded forgery restoration scam, she’s trying to make it look like it’s in perfect condition so it becomes more valuable, netting the museum more insurance money when it’s stolen! Or, maybe what she’s doing is destroying its value through defacing it so it will be thrown away or sold at an extremely lowered price, and she can snatch it up for peanuts, restore it to its original state (since she’s the only one who knows what she did to it and how to fix it), and sell it for an exorbitant fee and make a killing! What a thief and scam artist, not to mention a liar and vandal! And this is the lady the investment house wishes to associate themselves with? Well, I’m not surprised an investment bank would think some dishonest scam like this was fine, but make sure they don’t steal all your money in some fraudulent scheme like the one shown in this commercial! I’d think a bank, especially an investment bank, would want to distance themselves from association with anything that smacks of dishonesty, fraud, or malfeasance, especially after all the fraud that was exposed during the recent financial crisis, but I guess not these guys.
The funniest thing to me about this ad is that this woman has a complete disregard for rules, laws, etc., and an absolute absence of fear of consequences, as though she knows she couldn’t be caught or held accountable no matter what she does. She just waltzes right into the museum and sticks her piece of broken plate right onto a valuable masterpiece hanging on the wall (!). And she gets away with it with no consequences! (In real life, it is generally frowned upon for people to walk up to valuable museum exhibits and alter them.) In this way, it’s a lot like the Wall Street investment banks, with their “too big to fail” status, who know they’ll always get away with whatever scam they run or illegal way they bilk money out of people with absolute impunity because they could destroy the economy if they fail; plus they give so much campaign money to politicians, they know the government will never come after them because then they wouldn’t get so much money donated later, and they might be implicated in corruption stuff if they prosecuted these guys. And this is what this ad makes me think of: Spoiled, pampered rich people with an absolute reckless and selfish disregard for all rules and laws, doing whatever the hell they feel like without fear of consequences, because they know they’ll always get away with whatever illegal or immoral thing they want to do because they’re so rich. But maybe that’s just me. In any case, unless it is just me, this ad is communicating a very cynical message that many Americans might find just a tad irksome right about now, even if it is unintentionally communicated. But the funny thing is, the bank’s advertising department didn’t seem to notice or object to this the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me attitude of the main character in this spot, and they don’t mind being associated with her, so it makes them seem like they’re like that themselves. And that makes them seem really out-of-touch (not to mention possibly dishonest).
I mean, look: the idea is cute and all, but it just has this undercurrent of reckless disregard for society, rules, etc., and it makes their message look inextricably linked with completely out-of-touch, think-the-rules-don’t-apply-to-them, greedily depraved rich people. And if this message is only aimed at that kind of people, since they have most of the money anyway, then kudos on the accurate targeting of their target demographic! Maybe this is the intent, after all. But if they’re trying to attract business from people who are not spoiled, hyper-entitled aristocrat-types, then epic fail, dude! Unless…
What if they’re actually aiming their ads at not-rich-yet-but-wanting-desperately-to-be-spoiled-over-entitled-rich-jerks-type people? Like, say they want people to use their investment service, with the subliminal suggestion in the ad that if they invest with them, they’ll soon become part of this class of ultra-wealthy rule-ignoring do-whatever-the-hell-they-want people. Then perhaps, if they know their market are venal scumbags, and they’re right, perhaps this campaign will work really well for them, showing some arrogant, selfish bitch as the kind of person their clients are hoping to soon become. Then it would be appropriate, I suppose, showing these people a hopeful goal for who they’d like to be, and offering them a service that will (purportedly) help them become like that person. But for nice people who respect society and the law, this ad should simply turn them off, and remind them of all the things they don’t like about rich people, and investment banks.
But there’s an easy way to communicate this idea of the “missing piece” without generating those negative thoughts about banks and the rich, and it’s this: Show a couple with a puzzle of a picture of what they’d like their retirement to be, but there is a piece missing in the middle of it. They look around for it, but they can’t find it, so they call their investment advisor, who comes over with the missing piece. They put the missing piece in the puzzle, which completes the picture, and the camera zooms into the picture, dissolving away the jigsaw lines, and turning the picture into a video, which the couple then steps into, showing them living their dream retirement.
Maybe this has been done before, I don’t know; but it seems to me that this solves all those problems I listed above. The only problem is that it might look like the investment guy stole the puzzle piece the last time he was at their house. So make it clear that it’s a new investment advisor, or maybe even have the investment advisor hand them something that morphs into the missing puzzle piece. Oh, but then it might look like black magic, and they’d burn her/him as a witch. But I guess we’re so used to CGI doing unrealistic things in ads, we’re just conditioned to seeing it do them; and seeing is believing, right?
I’m sorry I can’t give a link to this ad, since it’s so rife with ways to read it negatively about banks and the rich. I don’t even know what the company was that it was advertising for, since the content of the ad always had me thinking about all the stuff I could read into it, so I was distracted. Anyway, I’ve been looking for it again for two weeks, and I haven’t seen it, so maybe they pulled it. But probably not: the last time I thought an ad had been pulled, it was for that “My daughter is part fish” ad for United Healthcare, and then they ran it to death for a full month after I said I couldn’t find it.
No wait! It’s an ad for SPDR “Spider” investments! Here’s the ad (See? I wasn’t making it up!):
