The CIBC’s recently expanded Private Wealth Management campaign is pretty damn good! Saw the ads and loved it.
It proves the right clients get the right ads – or, at least, ads they deserve.
We did a similar “metaphor-type” campaign for a software company in the insurance business. It did NOT go well. Wish we had these folks as clients!
This is an excerpt from a book I have almost finished. I have my first book on Amazon and it will be released next month. It’s called “You suck at presentations!: Learn how to present like the Pros!” a topic near and dear to my heart.
The next book is a collection of Biz-Related Stuff called, “My Biz Book,” which will be available for purchase soon …
From “My Biz Book.”
While on a piece of business, yours truly, the ever-daunting Creative Director and “Suit in Creative-Sheep’s” clothing, was pitching some new ideas that – in my humble opinion – were simply brilliant. A problem we had with this client was that they had no USP (You know Rosser Reeves …et al) and in order to relieve them of some budget, we decided to press on in our inimitable fashion and do what a colleague of mine would call “Conditional Positioning”
Sidebar: God how I love that phrase. It means when you don’t have a strategy, no value prop and nary a USP on the horizon … you do some creative and wait till they figure it out. At least it won’t screw em up by doing something strategic.
By the way for all you closet etymologists out there, does “Strategic” come from the Latin words “Stray” and “Ejit.” (That is really funny if you say it out loud in an Irish accent.
Anyway, je digress…
We did up a series of wonderful ads using major iconic, historical figures to represent the timelessness, and structure of their software. Architectural references as a metaphor, in fact. Man, were we smart!
We had Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright and da Vinci. While I was presenting to the VP of Marketing and going along nicely performing my “Husky & Appaloosa” routine happily unveiling the boards in a similar fashion to when Michelangelo showed the Sistine Chapel to the Medici when I came to the ad using da Vinci’s famous Venetian portico. The VP sat, stared and like the moose in the fog lamps and said…”Who’s da Vinci?”
Inside I was having a great roar of laughter and was about to enjoy the moment of humour with him out loud by extolling a “Good one, Bubba!” When it dawned on me… “He wasn’t kidding. He was deadly serious!” This moron did NOT know who da Vinci was?
We had that lovely, awkward moment – akin to the seemingly endless pregnant silence on the front porch at the end of a first date wondering who puts out first – when the silence was broken by said marketing genius who told me point blank – “You know, you have to stop giving us all this crazy, wild stuff … we just want shots of handshakes and globes.”
Ok, listen … Skippy, maybe read a book? Or, if all you know about the world and culture and art came from Bugs Bunny cartoons find some re-runs. They mentioned da Vinci in episode 43 with Marvin the Martian.
I happily resigned the account.