Catching the Zeitgeist

Let’s face it not every brief contains the words, ‘if possible the campaign should be banned’.

The brief was to produce concepts for a company specialising in financial dispute resolution and debt reconsolidation for mainly blue collar clients in and around the construction industry.

Since the credit crunch they had seen a huge increase in clients requesting help dealing with banks that were refusing to extend overdrafts or extend credit terms. This had traditionally been a small area, with most of their work being in debt chasing and contract dispute resolutions.

The commissioning agency wanted a campaign that would position the client firmly outside the traditional financial environment that had been so badly discredited after the crash of the last 12 months. The simplest way to achieve this was an aggressively anti-bank campaign, that sailed as close to ASA rules as possible, which if banned would create free PR opportunities that would reach a larger audience than had the campaign actually been allowed to run.

My solution, though actually just a series of factual headlines, takes advantage of a simple mental letter swap and the currently held opinion that most bankers and in fact w…….!