Commonwealth Bank: “Anthem”, Agency: Goodby Silverstein and Partners, Director: Michael Bay

Major Questions: Why would you draw attention to the fact that an American company is doing your advertising? What is the message to consumers? Why should consumers care about this message?

I think the ad pretty much sucks. The “marketing team’s” response basically acknowledges that the advertisement doesn’t hit the mark. Was that the point; to create a really disastrous advertisement and then pay it out? And if so what does that communicate? Not much in my opinion.

Goodby Silverstein and Partners Creative Director and partner, Steve Simpson said “It is true that Americans are a convenient foil for all the excesses of modern marketing. It is really an advertising campaign about the artifices of advertising”.

Do bank consumers care that you are commenting on advertising? He also had to mention “User generated content” to his audience at the launch on Friday, 25th Jan:

“We live in an incredibly media navvy time, you know everyone is now a film maker – as we see on YouTube. User generated content is all the rage, because everyone has had an ad idea.”

However, the advertisement is a nice departure from the usual bank advertisement which continue to tell us that they truly value our business and they have exceptional service. Then you walk in the door and wait in line, or get charged for viewing your transaction history on the internet. I’ve even heard of one bank that charged a customer because they sneezed while withdrawing money from an ATM!

But to tell you the truth, I’m just sick of the banks (and other service providers) telling us they have exceptional service when THEY DON’T. For me, actions really do speak louder than words. In that sense, the Commonwealth Bank ad is a hell of a lot better than a lot of others, especially the latest from NAB which I despise.

The CommBank campaign will include viral components as well as outdoor, print, web and in-store advertising.

What do you think of the ad?

I don’t really know how I feel about this yet. I feel like I need to know how he died before I can really feel shocked or deeply saddened or whatever.

For the moment, I just wanted to say that he was such an amazingly talented, thoughtful person. The role that I will remember him for was Ennis in Brokeback Mountain. This film really affected me. His character was real!

“Yeah, a big part of Ennis, purely because as you said, there were very few words to convey his story and his battle, a big part of it was actually in fact going inside him and trying to explain his battle. I knew it was going to be a very physical performance and so I wanted to physicalise this battle within his posture or lack of posture, within his accent, like his voice was very important. I wanted him to be clenched and I wanted his mouth to be a clenched fist and I wanted to words to be just punching their way out from within. Just any form of expression had to be painful. So I spent a lot of time developing his stance, his physical and mental posture, cause that was going to be really important to the character.” – Health Ledger from the 7.30 Report (Jan 13, 2006)

Photo: Mick Tsikas – AAP

(Source: David Dale – Who We Are – A snapshot of Australia today)

This kind of language I can handle. What really bugs me: ‘Mundy’, ‘Toozdy’, ‘Winzdy’, ‘I done some shopping today’ and ’10 k’, ’3 pair’ and ’50 tonne’.

My Wikipedia spam lasted 20 days.

My strategy: I posted on the List of Awareness Ribbons page on Wikipedia on the 18 September 2007. I suggested that wearing the green and blue ribbon was a symbol of support to people with ‘centophobic tendencies’. I referenced this fact with a link to http://www.centophobia.com/fromprank/.

This sneaky addition was removed on the morning of 8 October; 20 days later. My prank was quite clearly spam and yet it still remained for 20 days. While the List of Awareness Ribbons page isn’t necessarily a hugely popular page, you would wonder how long it would take for less obvious changes to be corrected. I just hope no school children (or from my experience, university students) were reading this article during this time period.

Why did I do it? Because I wanted to know how efficient Wikipedia is. Tell me about your experience with Wikipedia. Do you love it?