A dancing pigeon, a caped squirrel…and a pile of trite

Somewhere along the line Virgin Money has lost its nerve with its latest campaign, and ended up with trite cliché, writes Dominic Mills.

I’ve been watching the new Virgin Money campaign, launched last week through M/Six, with a growing sense of bemusement.

In theory, it’s a great time for Virgin Money to be splurging its ad budget. Public disenchantment with banks remains high, it’s never been easier to switch, and consumers are increasingly comfortable with the concept of ‘challenger’ banks like TSB and Metro.

It is in this category, despite its Northern Rock heritage, that Virgin Money must see itself.

So what we might expect is something big, something bold, something splashy. Maybe something as land-grabbing as Virgin Atlantic’s Red Hot from 2009.

Nothing so exciting. The press ad features a caped squirrel – superman style – with a few lines about how Virgin looks after your ‘nuts’ – i.e. savings – and doesn’t mess around with ‘hook-and-bait’ introductory offers that fast disappear.

Hmm, squirrels and savings…how many times have we seen that before?

The TV ad stars a pigeon dancing to a nice ska song, The Selecter’s On My Radio. And, er, that’s it.

The central idea behind the campaign is that Virgin is a different kind of bank and, somehow, looks after your money (but not necessarily you) better. Hence the strapline ‘There’s money. And then there’s Virgin Money’.

If you watch the TV ad closely – and it had to be explained to me – you’ll see that the pigeon is unmoved by the line ‘There’s Money’, but struts his stuff as soon as the slogan ‘And there’s Virgin Money’ appears. It’s quite entertaining, once or twice…but doesn’t bear repeated viewing.

Is the public expected to notice this? And do ads really stand or fall on such fine detail?

I don’t think so, and in any case it seems irrelevant to me since the whole campaign is piled high with cliché and fuzzy thinking.

Let’s start with the line ‘There’s money. And then there’s Virgin Money’. It calls to mind M&S’s infamous food porn line – ‘This is not just chicken Kiev. This is M&S chicken Kiev’. The difference, of course, is that money is money, an entirely fungible product.

Food is very different, and you cannot prettify up money. It just is what it is.

The closest a bank can come to this is by offering the best savings rates, the least onerous T&Cs, or better service. But a quick check on the comparison sites shows there’s nothing special about what Virgin Money is offering. It’s by no means the worst, but it’s far from the best.

In any case, it is not the only bank to eschew illusory introductory offers. NatWest is also playing that card – check out Promise No. 4 – and got there before Virgin Money.

And there’s no attempt by Virgin Money to suggest, or show, superior service.

In the end, this feels like a half-hearted attempt to be different. Marketing Week quotes Virgin Money marketing director Paul Lloyd noting that research showed consumers couldn’t remember any financial services ads. So, in his words, Virgin Money “wanted to avoid the clichés and talk up service in a fun way.”

That might have been the intention, but it is not the result. If you want to see bank advertising that does break the category rules look no further than First Direct and Barry, an affable cockney platypus. Now that is different, and it does give First Direct real personality. And he’s a furry animal.

It seems to me, therefore, that somewhere along the line Virgin Money lost its nerve, and ended up with trite cliché.

This is a shame, and a wasted opportunity.

So long Timothy Spall, you did Wickes proud

After seven years, Wickes has dumped Timothy Spall, the voice behind what became a memorable line that somehow gave the brand added heft, warmth and credibility. “Wiiickes…It’s got our name on it”.

It’s a fairly ordinary line, but the way Spall conveyed it – that stretched ‘i’ in Wickes, no regional bias, a rich tone, full of character – that suggested a friendly, reliable builder or plumber – and pushed it into the national consciousness. That, plus the fact that it lent itself to endless parodies.

Back in 2012, no less a judge of advertising than Charles Vallance, the V of VCCP, described himself as a huge fan of the campaign and the voiceover.

Instead we have a new campaign – new marketing director, new agency, naturally – and a new endline: ‘Wickes…Just do it right’.

The ad itself, based on the notion that British men are hopeless DIY bodgers, is quite nice, but the endline lacks the punch of Spall’s. It’s just, well, anodyne.

I’m told by someone in the studio at the time that the Wickes team was deeply divided about the merits of using Spall.

This was partly to do with the way he worked. Apparently, there was a short window in the day, about 30 minutes before lunch, when he’d give his best work – mornings and post-lunch were a write-off.

But it was also about cost – at the time Spall was a feature of the Harry Potter series – and the fact that some wanted a ‘cor blimey, bish bosh bash’ tone that sounded like your average British workman.

Well done to whoever insisted on Spall. It was worth it.

I bet the new voiceover doesn’t last.