Despite my constant harping on the dearth of extraordinary advertising we’re treated to every day, I do occasionally run across some. And I’m always impressed when it falls into a category I’d describe as “hard”; hard as in gotten past clients to whom it’s not easy to sell anything good to–like financial people. Not to mention, hard as in done in an area in which it’s never easy to do anything interesting–like financial stuff.
And I’m especially impressed when the advertising is a campaign and not just a one-off, the former being a telltale sign of an idea that is genuinely sui generis, while the latter is often just a matter of blind pigs tripping over a truffle now and then.
This campaign for Northern Trust meets all of the aforesaid criteria. In particular, I think its use of a trope all-too-familiar to the PowerPoint-obsessed crowd the ads are addressed to, but in this case, to illustrate benefits of a far higher order than graphs like these normally dramatize is positively brilliant. And the campaign certainly has legs.
Of course, a better art director than I am (which would include 99.9% of all art directors currently engaged in converting oxygen to carbon dioxide) could probably suggest a few ways to make these ads a little less “quiet” as Ralph Ammirati used to say. Finding a better way to balance the unavoidable, but somewhat expected stock photos with the infinitely more interesting graphs would be a good starting place. But that’s a cavil considering the degree of difficulty these ads had to contend with.
Which raises the question of why the awards shows don’t employ a “degree of difficulty” factor and why, as a result, ads such as these may never appear in any of the show annuals. It’s a missed opportunity, if you ask me, to make the awards shows more than an opportunity to drop a canape while inspecting the decolletage of someone from broadcast production or yet-another chance to master those bow-ties that don’t clip on.
They could be very instructive and encouraging to clients–hard ones and otherwise. And in so doing, significantly improve the climate for extraordinary advertising. But that would impose a degree of difficulty on the organizers and judges of these extravaganzas that they’re apparently not prepared to tackle yet.
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