I guess you could run a worse ad – but it would be hard

You might think that if there were one kind of advertiser really concerned about not wasting money it would be those involved with money.

But if ever I want to marvel at the largest possible quantity of bad, clueless, ugly advertising in one place I turn to “Money Week”.

There, without fail you will see God alone knows how many thousands pissed away by people who should know better.

I featured this ad as a typical example in my recent Bristol copy day.

Nobody in the audience commented, nor did I notice, that the man leaping up is Jose Mourinho.

So here we have  case of stupidity redoubled.

Not just a bad ad with a silly headline and copy carefully reversed out to be hard to read.  It’s a  silly picture, too.

Amazingly, when people see football being played they think an ad must be about football. But to compound the folly, can you imagine how much these witless squanderbugs must have paid to get The Special One?

I know he makes a lot of money. But ask yourself, even if the ad were not so bad: is a football manager an investment expert?

For that matter I have long wondered what tortuous logic led somebody at Santander to portray Lewis Hamilton as your best guide to where to bank.

But I always wonder how many millions of investors’ good money is frittered away on this kind of bilge.

Is it entirely beyond the realms of reason for those who commission it, those who create it and those who approve it to acquaint themselves, however slightly, with the kindergarten basics of advertising?

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

1 Comments

  1. Wow.

    Oddly enough, in spite of having “noticed” so much poor advertising in the financial industry … I hadn’t given it any more attention that all the OTHER bad advertising out there. And the almost oxymoronic (drop the “oxy”, and there’s nothing “almost” about it) irony of this particular industry wasting money in this way had never occurred to me.

    Thanks for pointing this out, Drayton! 🙂

    — Al

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