NOW THAT’S FUNNY:Selling Finserv Through Laughter
03/18/2010

 

In the serious world of financial advertising, the Levinson Tractenberg Group in New York City has taken a chance with humor and discovered an opportunity.

The ad agency has developed several witty ad campaigns in what would otherwise be considered a sober domain. For one thing, there is the ad for Chubb Group of Insurance Companies in which a woman with a picnic basket waves a red blanket in the wind, unaware of the hard-charging bull in the distance. The picture is accompanied by the slogan, “Who insures you doesn’t matter, until it does.” 

It is similar to the campaign the same company designed for the New York City personal injury law firm Trolman, Glaser & Lichtman, in which a stern-looking woman complains about the horrible injury she has suffered. The viewer hears about the machete-like pain she is feeling. Then she reveals that the injury is nothing more than a little paper cut and shows the Band-Aid on her finger as proof. “They made that paper way too sharp. Someone has to pay,” she exclaims.The voiceover then states: “If you’ve been injured, call us. But keep in mind, you need to really be injured.”

Whether it is an ad for insurance companies or attorneys, there is a need for humor, according to Joel Tractenberg, a partner at the Levinson Tractenberg Group. Most of the ads in those sectors are serious, but it is also important to find something to laugh about.

“We like to go the opposite way as long as it fits the brand,” says Tractenberg about his firm’s philosophy. “We don’t want to be silly or goofy. We want to be tasteful.”

In these times of economic uncertainty especially, people need a reason to smile.

“We have to have a sense of humor, otherwise we would be in trouble,” says Tractenberg. “We need a sense of optimism.”

But just because auto insurance companies, such as Progressive Insurance, use comedy, it does not mean that it is appropriate for every finserv company. Banks, for example, are less apt to use it. With all the trouble they have been having recently, it simply would not be as effective, according to Jon Swallen, senior vice president for research at Kantar Media in New York. 

“Humor is more difficult with banks, if not outright ill-advised. Auto insurance is unique, though, because every licensed driver is in the market,” Swallen says. “It is a commodity you have to buy, although you hope you never have to use it.”

Banks and investment firms, though, tend to use ads that deliver a more straight forward and sober message. The TD Ameritrade ads with Sam Waterston are a good example of that.

“You wouldn’t want to get a funny message from Goldman Sachs right now,” states Jonathan Schoenberg, creative director for TDA in Boulder, Col. TDA is the advertising firm that created the ad series for FirstBank.

“Banks have been acting like monarchies for a long time,” he continues. “You used to wear a tie to go into a bank. You don’t have that same relationship any more.”

The objectives of the two different sectors are not the same, according to Swallen. Insurance ads are mainly targeted toward name recognition and lead generation.

“We want to get people to take the first step and be aware of the brand,” he says.

Much insurance marketing is directed toward selling policies with the lowest price, as if that were the customer’s only concern. GEICO and Progressive are certainly instrumental in that category.

“It is a question of how you can stand out and build awareness and brand recognition,” Swallen adds.

It is debatable, however, whether a funny ad packs enough information for the customer to understand the product. While some ads are built only for a laugh and the name recognition that comes with it, others such as the new Nationwide campaign, do include enough content to tell people about things such as the vanishing deductible and discount finder.

Those messages are communicated by a new character known as the “The World’s Greatest Spokesperson in the World,” which replaces the “Life Comes at You Fast” ads. He is a man who has supposedly retired to the deep woods, but is coerced out of seclusion to work with Nationwide to promote their new programs.

“Our tongue is firmly planted in cheek,” comments Brad Brinegar, chairman and CEO of McKinney of Durham, N.C., the agency that created the campaign. Although the tone is definitely funny, it comes complete with plenty of information, including its long-held slogan: “Nationwide is on your side.”

Although he could be characterized as goofy, the “Spokesperson” makes it a point to explain to a customer on the ad that vanishing deductibles will “take one hundred dollars off for every year she does not have an accident.”

It is the first time Nationwide has used a recurring character in an ad campaign.

“Nationwide is taking a different tack,” Brinegar continues. “We’re not preaching from the mouth. This is more than just paying premiums and getting the lowest price. It is more of a proactive experience. ‘On your side’ means a proactive customer experience.”

Executives at Nationwide realized that this is a good strategy for them to take.

“As we thought about our new campaign, we knew we needed someone special – an advocate for our customers,” said Steven Schreibman, vice president of advertising and brand management for Nationwide. 

“McKinney is reinventing the conversation between consumers and brands,” Brinegar says. “With financial advertising, you have to engage the people. It’s a dry category. People have a hard time understanding it.” Automobile insurance may be more apt to utilize humor because people have to buy it. State laws throughout the country dictate that they cannot choose not to, he adds.

“Humor was very ripe for Nationwide. We have taken several months to look at the execution and we have the research to validate it,” Brinegar continues. The campaign has been designed to appear on television, direct response TV, online and search engines. Several segments that have not appeared on the air can be seen online. Those on DRTV are longer so they have more information. They first appeared on Feb. 12 during the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics and later that same weekend on the broadcast of the Daytona 500. McKinney became Nationwide’s advertising agency of record in the middle of 2009.
 
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There are plenty of amusing financial ads on the air and in print. Some are so familiar they are almost cliche. Others are not quite so well known. But they are all representative of what is happening. Refresh your memory with this list:

> Aflac’s duck, which was one of the early financial ads in recent memory to turn to humor (actually, the first one was much earlier when E.F. Hutton developed the slogan “When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen”);

> The frustrated kids just wanting to play on the Ally Bank ads;
> E*Trade’s hysterical talking and singing babies;
> The sparkling singing trio for freecreditreport.com;
> The GEICO cavemen, gekko and stacks of money, all of which are designed to promote different aspects of their coverage (the company spent $625 million on advertising in 2008);
> Progressive’s campaign with Flo, the flighty but good-hearted young saleswoman;

> The dog who worries about his bone until it is safe within reach in the Travelers Insurance ads; and

> The pieces for SunLife in which they want other companies to change their names (for example, from Sun Valley to SunLife Valley).

But take a look on YouTube, where many ads are stored. Bits that are no longer on the air because their company is no longer in business can also be seen there. Such is the case with Washington Mutual, in which a group of executives threatens to jump off a roof en masse. It is purely ironic these days because some of them may have been tempted to do just that when it went under in real life.

Along the same line are the now-tabled ads from AIG in which a little boy gets up in the middle of the night to ask his parents, “Does your retirement plan provide predictability of income and protection against market risk?” to which his parents answer, “We have AIG.” Only then could the lad go back to sleep safe in the knowledge that all was well in his household. The irony here is that if AIG could have predicted its own problems, it still might be in business.

So what makes humor so attractive to financial advertisers?

For some creatives, such as Schoenberg of TDA, it is a classic battle between comedy and tragedy, something dating back all the way to ancient Greek theatre. “Comedy is a nicer way to engage the consumer,” he says. It is also a good way to reach young customers. “The primary tone is serious,” he says. “It (finance) is a serious topic.”

Some finserv companies may feel that these are not the best times to be funny. But FirstBank’s plans were started well before the economic downturn, according to Schoenberg. Part of the problem, he finds, is that so many ads today are geared to communicate messages from advertiser to advertiser, and not to their customers.

“We use humor because it is one of the tools in our tool belt,” says Tractenberg. “Humor can soften a preachy message and you don’t want to be preachy. It’s a great way to break through and make it approachable.” The Chubb ads have received a good response from consumers, he says, and have, in fact, been rated as the No. 1 most-remembered ad in a recent survey.

Of course, one of the stumbling blocks with humor is that what may be funny to some people may not be to someone else.

“Humor takes many forms,” comments Swallen of Kantar Media. “Not every commodity has the same humor to each person.”

“Any brand has to be careful with how they are viewed,” says Brinegar. “Humor can always be used effectively or ineffectively.”

But does all this mean that a trend has been created in finserv advertising? Tractenberg says he doesn’t think so, adding that the primary tone of the sector tends to remain serious. But there is a lot of it on the airwaves, as the list above demonstrates. The trend that Schoenberg sees is that there is increasingly little information found in spots, especially the humorous ones. Compare that with print ads from the 1940s and ’50s in which full pages were filled with small type explaining everything there is to know about the company. The primary task of these ads today is to get people to turn to the firm’s web page, where most of the detailed information can be found.

It is sometimes hard to know what the viewers’ reactions will be, but a study conducted by RoperASW back in 2002 indicated that as many as 85 percent of all respodents said that they “like ads with humorous themes.”

Research about the effectiveness of humorous ads is hard to come by but one study by the University of Florida shows that when Hispanics are split into two groups – Cuban-Americans and Mexican-Americans – and compared, the ones from Mexico prefer funny financial ads. As Jorge Villegas states in his abstract, “This finding suggests that Mexican-Americansmight use affective information, instead of cognitive strategies,to form attitudes toward financial products.”

Schoenberg sums it all up by saying that the most important issue is whether we are just looking at humorous campaigns as such or treating these as proof of us being human. Showing our funny side is a part of that.

“And being human is part of our culture,” he says.