Maybe they customize them for different Metropolitan Statistical Areas, but in my area (NYC) the television ads for a bank called "Capital One" have taken several crazy twists, each one more annoying than the last. They have a separate and equally brazen (and disgusting) set of commercials for their credit cards, on which I shall also comment.
The offending campaign concerns their boasting about how many branches they have. Each branch is represented by a three-story-high red pushpin (like on a map!), except that the pushpin arrives plunging through the lower atmosphere much as would a missile, embedding itself violently in the sidewalk outside of each supposed Capital One branch. My problem is with the violent, transgressive, anti-New York feeling evoked by the sight of giant missiles attacking the city, and perhaps worse, the notion that people will see this (broken sidewalks and all), and instead of fleeing the invasion, go about their business, mildly curious, quite as if they had been hoping, mildly, to see one of these random, dangerous attacks for themselves (there is an element of terrorism as well as an element of unseemly voyeurism to it, in my opinion). In an especially baffling twist, there is even a giant pushpin that smashes into and pins a taxi to the ground, while an Islamic-looking driver gets out and seems dismayed that his taxi has been utterly destroyed. His reaction is as if someone had spilled Kool-Aid on the hood.
Lately the campaign has morphed into something truly monstrous. Now the giant destructive pushpins are simply part of the city landscape--giant, red alien presences blocking sidewalks--and cityfolk have adopted them as the kind of sorta-fun, only-in-NY semi-nuisances that get accepted as part of the diverse urban landscape (like counterfeit handbag hawkers?--rogue shish-kebab vendors?). Children jump rope under them; teens jump up and tag their umbrella-like edges. Dog-walkers get their leashes tied up around their steely poles but with colorful panache. Then it turns out the Rockettes have come up with a peppy, inspirational song about how these pushpins [branches] are "here, there, everywhere" while riding past atop a doubledecker tourist bus. At last, the jump-roping kids ask us "What's in your wallet?" as if we had somehow got onto that subject.
It is all quite incoherent as effective marketing, but the chilling message remains: we have invaded and you're going to like it. This hearkens back to an earlier and more interesting Capital One campaign that then morphed into a truly brazen and awful spectacle of cruelty and indifference.
A couple of years ago, a Capital One Ad Genius apparently came up with the idea that, since high-interest, no-reward credit cards could be construed as predatory, they could fairly be depicted as a Viking horde pillaging the suburban landscape--until the doughty Capital One credit card customer flashed his/her magic plastic, which seemed to rob the buffalo-robed Huns of their strength and made them drop their maces and halberds and crawl away simpering like stricken curs. The tag line was "What's in your wallet?" as if to say "watch out--your credit card may be eating you alive". Fair enough.
That campaign, at least, could pass the test for consistent logic. But then the Capital One Ad Genius took this tenuously coherent idea and turned it into something truly wretched. Now the Capital One Huns became everyday inhabitants of our world, and instead of marauding, simply misbehaved incoherently. They clanked weapons down at airport security, they smashed lobsters with sledgehammers at fancy restaurants, they were unusually cruel to women whose hair they were styling at the Hun Hair Salon. Then, quite inappropriately, one of them would turn his snaggletoothed visage to the viewer and croak "What's in your wallet?". The tag-line no longer made sense, since the Huns had turned goofy and apparently had been widely accepted (unlike the long-suffering Geico cavemen). The Ad Genius had lost the thread.
At last the thread became utterly entangled (I am sure the marketers were touting it as "convergence") around the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the jump-roping kids. As noted above, the jump-roping kids are now asking us what's in our wallet. This represents the altogether fatuous assumption that we, in reality, have adopted the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the inanely parading Rockettes as part of our own personal landscape, and would know perfectly well what sort of message was being delivered to us when the jump-roping kids asked us what was in our wallet.
The problem is that the Hun ploy was tenuous to begin with; that the pushpins were offensive; and the two paired became utterly contemptuous of reason and good sense.
I know little about the actual business of Capital One nor do I care to know it. I do know their Ad Genius should be fired for having polluted our televisions with a series of degrading, insulting, incoherent commercials that make me wonder about the collective soundness of executive minds at the client company.
What's in your commercial?
