So long, ‘Saint’ Antony…your Barclays ads were different

Rebuilding consumer trust? Barclays’ ‘Digital Eagles’ ad campaign, with Jacqueline and Jennifer.

As Barclays sacks CEO Antony Jenkins – nicknamed Saint Antony due to his pledge to transform the bank’s values – Dominic Mills examines the impact the move will have on advertising.

Personally, I’m rather sorry to see ‘Saint’ Antony Jenkins, defenestrated as Barclays CEO last week, depart for the sunny uplands of a career outside banking.

Yes, his sanctimoniousness was beginning to grate, but he was a man on a mission – to clean up Barclays and put customer service at the forefront of everything it did – and self-righteousness is an inevitable by-product of people imbued with a sense of purpose.

His crime? All the culture change at Barclays wasn’t producing the results – as measured by profits and share price – fast enough.

But as a customer of Barclays (and, full disclosure, someone who very briefly worked on the bank’s content marketing), I could see the difference he was making.

This was not only in the branch, where every experience I had was positive, but also in its advertising. The current ‘digital eagles’ campaign (below) is a good example. If there is an award for ‘Best use of a Grannie’ – a category shamefully violated by Wonga – this campaign could be a contender.

But you can also see a wealth of helpful and informative stuff here on its YouTube channel, all of which underlines the Barclays proposition.

They are a far cry, for those who can remember, from the nauseating chest-beating ads featuring Anthony Hopkins from a few years ago.

Of course, I know ‘Saint’ Antony’s involvement in the ads was minimal, but he created the culture in which they could flourish, and in which – and this is vital in any service industry – the promise made by the ads was delivered in real life.

As a result, Barclays had begun to carve a space genuinely differentiated from its competition. This matters for two reasons. The first, to state the obvious, is that banks were (and continue to) suffering from a near-catastrophic loss of trust.

The second is that they are facing an unprecedented series of competitive threats – new entrants, digital banking and technology that cuts the barriers to entry and means, for payment functions and the like, they could be up against the likes of Apple and Google, not to mention PayPal.

Oh, and that’s before we even think of a new generation of digitally-savvy, empowered customers who want their banks to answer to them, not the other way round.

At the same time, we’ve already seen challenger banks arriving on the High Street – Metro Bank, TSB and the upcoming spin-off from RBS, Williams and Glyn.

But that doesn’t include the 25-plus bank start-ups that are waiting for approval from the Bank of England.

One that will be going live shortly is Atom Bank, which last week announced that it had appointed Mother as its advertising agency. That, in itself, is a statement of intent: you don’t pick Mother just to produce the same ad guff as the other banks.

[advert position=”left”]

Atom is an online-only bank – which makes sense: anyone launching a bank today would be mad to copy the others – and is the first of a wave of competitors that are going to shake things up.

You can get a sense of Atom’s personality by visiting its website. It’s relaxed, informal and sounds friendly. And of course it’s entirely app-based, meaning speed and convenience are the heart of its proposition.

But the characteristic that Atom – and its fellow challenger banks – do not yet have is trust. This they will have to build, and it is the one card (albeit a tarnished one) that the established banks have to play.

You can see this writ large in the Adam&Eve epic released last month for Lloyds to celebrate its 250th anniversary. At first glance it looks and sounds like a John Lewis ad (no surprises there), only with a black horse instead of a penguin.

At second glance it looks like load of self-congratulatory tosh designed to make the population go ‘meh’ and give the directors a nice warm feeling in their trousers.

But in reality, it’s about trust – the underlying message being that a bank that has been around for 250 years (never mind the egregiously bad behaviour, PPI mis-selling, more PPI scams and so on) is one that can be trusted.

Actually I quite like the ad, but you don’t have to be a neuro-scientist to decode the imagery: horse-drawn fire tender rescues child; horse transport for our brave WW1 troops; horse-drawn dray delivers milk; horse makes a disabled rider happy; and so on…ending with the line ‘By your side for 250 years’.

And so back to a Barclays post ‘Saint’ Antony. Does his ejection mean Barclays will be giving up on being all nicey-nicey in a bid to regain our trust? No, they would be mad to. To throw all the progress he made out of the window would be folly.

So, one might expect, the advertising strategy isn’t likely to change overnight. Equally, however, the new CEO is, by definition, going to be different from ‘Saint’ Antony and, one might expect, take a less cuddly approach.

At some point therefore, the tension between the outside message as expressed by the advertising (i.e. trust us, we love you, we’re here to be helpful) and the internal message (we’re tough, we’re focused on profitability) will reveal itself.

And that’s when it will get interesting.