These ads for Fidelity’s retirement investment stuff are pretty good at communicating their message: stay with the plan: follow the
green line (like follow the yellow-brick road! Hey, actually, maybe they could
use The Wizard of Oz characters for a
new campaign next! And at the end, they all get what they’ve been hoping and
pining for in the movie! Actually, I think this is possibly quite a good
concept, here. But is it too expensive to license?). But I’ve always wanted
them to show what happens when people stray off the line.
They could have some guy get distracted by some flashy car
or something, and then he gets hit by a bus (!). Or maybe someone will stray
off the green line and get hit with a stray bullet from some robbery, and the
Fidelity investment person could say: “I told him to stay on the green line!
Gosh, when will they ever learn?” And then the camera could pan back into a
bird’s-eye view, and there are green lines with dead people all over the place
just a few feet off of the green lines, and EMS workers picking the corpses up
off the roads. (Um; oh, the humanity, I suppose.) And that would serve to
remind us of the horrible fate that awaits anyone who would stray from the
green line! (Or might that scare people away?)
Or, for even more fun, maybe Fidelity could put green lines
out in front of their competitors’ businesses, and when their competitors
follow them, they lead them straight underneath a falling piano, or a stampede
of charging bulls, etc. Then, after a little while, they would be the only ones
left! (Talk about destroying the competition!)
Here’s an example of this ad campaign with the green line:
