Directwatch: Capital One Platinum MasterCard

by Carole Lowe, Planning director, Archibald Ingall Stretton, Marketing 28-Apr-04

Television, the first place to look when you're reviewing a dire ... sorry, direct mail, piece from one of the industry's most prolific exponents - a financial institution. Capital One seems to have made a big jump forward (and upward) with its latest TV campaign. Gone are the mermaids, Vikings and whatever else was being badly dubbed, to be replaced by little toy monsters, which represent interest rates either jumping up or staying low.

If you haven't seen it, you may be questioning my judgement (in fact, if you have seen it, you may still be questioning it). But it has a number of things that most other financial advertising lacks. It's simple. It has a clear message.

It is also rather charming, and the poster ad is executed with the same qualities.

So why has no effort been made to take this creative theme through to the direct mail piece that's flapping around in my hands? Lead times?

I doubt it. The time it takes for a TV campaign to be bought and shot is a lot longer than for a mailing.

Maybe I'm in the dark here; maybe there is another piece of work out there for the same product, which does feature those cute little monsters.

Or perhaps somebody decided this work was strong enough without the uplift in response that advertising awareness would undoubtedly bring.

If that is the case, or I am looking at an old control pack, then I apologise.

But I will judge the work on its merits as a standalone piece. It's boring.

The headline's bland. The copy's flat. The imagery's dull. However, everything is in the right place, the form has all the right tints and the call to action screams the way we were all taught it should. But the little monsters make me smile and I can only think that someone must have been scared of them.

And there's the pity, because we are all becoming so 'rate blind'. I have very high recall of a blur of mailings this side of Easter, all offering me 0% on balance transfers and a low, low rate of interest. As to which company was saying what, that's quite another matter.

This is a problem endemic in financial advertising. An institution with 97 levels of hierarchy has no time to spend on worrying about the consistency of its brand. All it wants is to have its rate out there, nice and big. After all, what has worked before will work again. And that is the problem: it does work. But not forever, I hope.