Issued by: C-Cubed Communications
First National Bank (FNB) has followed its highly entertaining launch and awareness campaigns for the One Account with a tongue-in-cheek take on one of television’s most successful ‘soapies’ – Days of Our Lives.
Developed by FNB’s marketing partner, FCB Johannesburg, the new One Account campaign is called ‘Loans of Our Lives’.
The brief put to FCB Johannesburg’s strategic team was to produce infomercials to explain the benefits of the product, launched 18 months ago, and demonstrate the relevant savings. A customer depositing his or her salary into the One Account and consolidating all his debt into a One Account, enables the customer to shave years off his loan and pay the combined debt off at one low rate.
Explaining the creative treatment, FCB South Africa group executive director, Ashley Bacon, said One Account has always had an ‘irreverent’ personality so there was an opportunity to push the envelope even further than usual.
“Once the ‘soap opera big idea’ had been mooted and given the go ahead by the client, the FCB strategists and the account management teams, FCB Johannesburg’s creatives Ulric Charteris and Jean Roux Bezuidenhout developed the scripts,” he said.
“Briefly, information about the One Account is written into typical ‘soapie’ scenarios and dialogue – a central character is used to ‘incidentally’ demonstrate the savings as the soap opera ‘stars’ talk through their financial woes and are then – in true soap style – given advice. In one scene, the character appears as an artist in the park and his canvas becomes the medium on which the savings are calculated; in another he is a waiter but this time his menu board is used as the vehicle.
For example, a character called Minky says: ‘You have to pull yourself together, Lesley. For once listen to your mother, now I know that I’m not your real mother, and when your real mother was abducted by the Russian mafia after your father joined that religious sect I took you into my home and it wasn’t much of a childhood being raised as a girl till you were eighteen, but we only had sons and your stepfather would have died if I had told him the truth after all those years, but that’s the past’. Lesley responds: ‘Mum, I can’t seem to manage my finances’ to which Minky suggests: ‘Why don’t you just get a One Account?’. She goes on to explain, among other points, that ‘Now, with a One Account, because your income goes straight into your account you’ll save about R300 a month on interest. And if you keep that R300 in your account every month in total you’ll save about R80 000 over the term of your loan’. The central character is present in this scene as a waiter chalking up the savings on his menu board.
“As the information to be communicated is relatively technical in nature, Ulric and Jean had to strike a perfect balance between entertainment and education; to further enhance the ‘soap opera’ concept, we cast ‘real-life’ soap stars in each commercial. I think the result is spot-on,” said Bacon.
The two commercials were shot in studio over three days by Red Pepper.
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