In the halcyon days of bank deregulation before the dotcom and subprime meltdowns, replicants on K Street, Wall Street and Main Street stirred a vortex of chicanery that has come to define our spiraling global economy.
In the midst of that euphoria, a mega bank headquartered in the Bible Belt launched a national advertising campaign called The Financial World.
The campaign was insanely complex and sophisticated. Cutting across currents of irrational exuberance, the TV spots you see here looked like bonfires of the vanities. They warned that explosive markets and financial services were rife with evil, that money was mad, that many bankers, brokers and underwriters were monsters.
It seemed so crazy at the time. Now it looks rather prescient. You can watch the spots and decide for yourself.
Bank chairman and CEO Ed Crutchfield, advertising giant Hal Riney, and movie mogul George Lucas authored the campaign’s dystopian vision. Hundreds of millions were spent producing and broadcasting the spots on Super Bowl Sunday and across the prime time spectrum.
Yet almost nobody understood The Financial World, least of all employees of the bank itself.
Everybody knows that advertising gets a brand into the minds and maybe hearts of consumers. Yet if employees act contrary to the brand, consumers will believe the employees and not the advertising. When that happens, everything the right hand (marketing) gives, the left hand (human resources) takes away. The brand becomes tinsel, and the organization comes down with cognitive dissonance.
That’s when learning a brand is critical.
Becker Multimedia figured this out (it's not in a textbook) when we helped leverage the The Financial World across several dimensions of corporate training: onboarding, brand boot camp, customer service, change management, and leadership development. Our assignment was to train employees who didn't necessarily understand or even like their brand how to live it.
The Igniter shown here is a very narrow slice of the method we used. We composited nether world imagery from Industrial Light and Magic with candid shots of bankers at work and families at play. We created a call to arms directly from Hal Riney to all bank employees (not only the elite) and mixed his authoritative voice with an uplifting song about unity by Celtic music star Dougie MacLean.
Suddenly brand concepts that were obscure and alien began to feel exciting.
The Igniter was a one-hour broadcast that ran weekly for two years on the bank’s satellite network. Together with several other training applications, it turned the CEO’s vision outside in and showed employees how to live their brand rather than wear it or fear it.
The bank gradually morphed into the second largest financial services firm in the United States. The Financial World campaign was eventually retired, but its essence remains highly relevant today:
You enter the financial world in search of a secure future. Instead you find chaos and confusion.
You'll hear those words in "Noise." They could have been minted this morning. With most banks basically underwater, there are very few bankers these days living a brand and throwing out a lifeline. It's not because they can't. They just don't know how.
Comments