Those Halifax singing staff ads. Admittedly they're an easy target, but they annoy the crap out of me. First there was the bottle-bespectacled Howard, who had "character" and became something of a brand mascot. In the words of Halifax Chairman, Lord Stevens:
"...nothing emphasises the importance of the contribution made by our front line colleagues better than the television advert featuring Howard Brown."
Erm, right... so apparently one of the perks of working as a minion for Lord Stevens is that you might end up singing in an advert? The latest ad features several staff posing as an R&B outfit (Big Brothaz?), but it is a pretty laughable concept, to me at least. I'm sorry, but if you were "street" you'd be peddling drugs and pimping hos, rather than advising people about which mortgages to buy.
Still, the ads have won a bunch of industry awards. And the Chartered Institute of Marketing has published a highly entertaining and self-congratulatory case study that you can read here. My oversized brain is particularly baffled by the meaningless graphic (the ordinate axis is not labelled) accompanied by a provocative claim that the campaign "converted at more than 100% efficiency to the target markets of 16-34 ABC1s". How can anything be more than 100% efficient? Have Halifax's advertisers somehow found a solution to the global energy crisis?
Incidentally, Judge Jon is (just) in the 16-34 ABC1 demographic. And I am not converted: I think the ads project a "chav" brand image. Let's face it, the ad campaign is "X-factor" / "Pop idol" / "Stars in their eyes" for Halifax staff and those are chav programmes. So let's keep the karaoke restricted to whatever wine bar Halifax staff let their hair down in on a Friday evening, shall we? And if Lord Stevens wants to motivate his front line staff, perhaps a share in the bonuses he enjoys might be equally effective and less annoying for the rest of us.
