GOODBY PRESENTS ANTHEM TO COMM BANK

The Commonwealth Bank launches its long-awaited branding work from Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco on Australia Day with a mockumentary-style campaign based around the bank working with its cast of well-meaning, but culturally clueless American advertising executives and invariably polite, persistent and patient Australian clients.
Launching on Nine during the cricket, Ten during the tennis and Foxtel/Austar tomorrow, there will be a video broadcast on NineMSN with live screening at Martin Place and Hyde Park. Running for a week it will be followed by a spot featuring the Australian cricket team and then a home loans spot. A MICROSITE has been developed which will showcase the ads with backgrounders about the cast members, which includes a copywriter/art director called Luke and Luke.
The Commonwealth’s Bank marketing general manager Mark Buckman says the campaign hasn’t been tested with the general public – the LAUNCH COMMERCIAL was only finished twenty minutes before he flew back from San Francisco last night – but he is confident the general public media is savvy enough to get it. He adds that picking up on the humour is not reliant on the general public knowing the bank used an American agency.
When the first half of the commercial appeared on YouTube this morning, bloggers went into over-drive unsure whether it was a joke or the real offering, a reaction that reflects the scrutiny the bank has been under since appointing the US agency nine months ago.
Says Buckman: “It is intended to break the conventions of banking marketing and give something different that will stand out on Australian television. We saw multiple options before we landed on this campaign, which we think is bold and exciting. It’s quite provocative and is certainly different to what we have done before. We think it is really funny, sort of like Seinfeld meets The Office, but most importantly it gives us a device to communicate the many different ways the Commonwealth Bank is different to our competitors."
Goodby, which was recently named Advertising Age’s and AdWeek’s Agency of the Year, presented about three campaigns to the agency including one Buckman is calling a “safe" approach, which the bank rejected in favour of this more entertaining and edgier idea.
“In this media savvy world….being able to engage with the Australian public on an emotional level and connect with them in a way they will want to connect with us and find out more about the Comm Bank so what we have created is more like a sitcom series than it is conventional advertising," he says, admitting that it was partly inspired by the experience they had working on the campaign.
Goodby’s Steve Simpson, creative director on the campaign, says the agency is fictional and is not Goodby, but plays on Americans being a convenient foil for all the excesses of marketing and taps into the fascination for advertising.
Says Simpson: “Everyone is now a filmmaker as we see on YouTube, we invite the public to make their own commercials, user-generated content is all the rage and everyone I ever meet who finds out I’m in advertising has had an ad idea so there is this interest in what goes on behind-the-scenes so the making of this stuff becomes the subject of the advertising. There are clear stylistic nods to the Office, the way the silence is played, the awkwardness of the client’s reaction."
Print and outdoor ads, web advertising and in-brand materials will put the Bank’s message more simply, offering proof points of the Commonwealth’s new truth.
The Commonwealth Bank’s group executive, human resources and group services, Barbara Chapman says most people had a view of the bank as a traditional, established big bank, part of Australia but lacking in momentum and a bit lacking in energy: “Internally I see an organization that is quite different, it is going through a transformation of change and is focusing very much on the customer and customer service and our vision to excel in customer service is coming to life as we speak in every interaction that we have. It’s an unusual position where the perception of the bank is a little bit behind the reality."
She says 70% of its customers as nine or ten out of ten for their most recent branch interaction, making the biggest marketing challenge that of getting that perception changed among customers and staff
“It’s not just a tagline, ‘determined to be different’ is something we are going to live up to and we are living up to and will live up to that every single day. We are prepared to be judged by that commitment and that determination and it's not determined to be different from where we have been but to be different from every other bank in this market," she says.

AGENCY: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco
CREATIVE DIRECTORS: Rich Silverstein, Steve Simpson
COPYWRITERS: Pat McKay, Chris Beresford-Hill, Rick Condos
ART DIRECTORS: Feh Tarty, Will Hammond, Hunter Hindman
PRODUCERS: Barbro Eddy, Jake Grand
DIRECTOR: Eric Lynne
PRODUCTION COMPANY: Partizan Productions, Los Angeles

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