Bank/building society advertising

Three ongoing advertising campaigns for well-known financial service providers - NatWest, First Direct and Nationwide - seem to be basing their pitch to punters on the basis that their industry is full of shysters.

NatWest ads for a number of years have featured banks being rubbish at looking after their customers. From the 'my bank is now a trendy wine bar' ones a few years back to the 'yeah Will' series currently on TV they have portrayed banks treating the public like suckers. The FirstDirect ads currently showing feature a double act of a sales dude in a white suit and a cynical (potential?) customer in a black suit who doubts the motivations behind the promotions being offered. And the Nationwide ads are probably most extreme as they feature a bank manager who is fat, lazy and is open about how they take existing customers for granted, and clearly doesn't mind annoying customers to the point they leave.

I can understand this on one level. The public has a pretty low opinion of the financial services industry, so the pitch is basically "you're right to think that their are con artists in our industry, but we are different". But I'm not sure that playing up the bad reputation of the industry is a smart way to flog more services.

One of the reasons the banks built big impressive buildings in the past was to convey to the punters that they were solid, solvent and trustworthy. But with a lot of financial services advertising now playing on the idea that financial services companies treat their customers badly, isn't this just going to reinforce the idea that its an industry based on ripping off the punters? This will no doubt lessen the confidence of those who are already worried about financial matters. Even worse if might mean people almost expect it when they genuinely are ripped off by their provider.

RyanAir's cowboy advertising

Anti-union airline RyanAir is in trouble with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) yet again. This time the ASA has told it to withdraw an advert promoting "hottest back to school fares" with a picture of a model dressed up as a schoolgirl.

The follows the ASA pulling RyanAir up for misleading claims about lastminute.com , bogus claims about Eurostar and talking bollox about carbon emissions made by the aviation industry.

They are clearly a serial offender when it comes down to misleading and inappropriate advertising. It would be interesting to see what, if anything, institutional shareholders think about it.

Mobiles, magpies and markets

If there is one advert I really hate at the moment it's that Orange one with the slogan 'Good things should never end'. Several things about it make me want to put my foot through the telly. First is the irritating 'faux hippy' music and styling. Like, hey guys, we're just a bunch of crazy, idealistic slackers like you - our target 18-35 demographic - so why not sign up to a kooky contract with us?

But the slogan says it all really. It's the kind of meaningless hippyish-sounding but actually thoroughly self-indulgent blah you find in a lot of yoof oriented stuff these days. For instance, next time you're watching telly have a look at how many adverts are using folksy/hippy music, even as they try to sell you something you don't need and which is no doubt quite anti-hippy in its ethos. Unfortunately I'm too convinced that our feeble minds are easily fooled to not think that such hippy-corporate junk probably has an impact on us.

As an example of just how stoopid we can be, me and the Mrs were having a coffee this morning and saw a magpie land in a tree in the communal back yard which our flat faces into. We both agreed that when we see one magpie on its own we think of the "one for sorrow..." rhyme and instinctively feel a bit anxious. This is clearly ridiculous (unless someone is aware of any serious academic work suggesting a correlation between single magpie appearances and sorrowful events) but at some point in our lives we have been told it and, as irrational as it clearly is, it still features in our thinking even to the extent of provoking an emotional response when we see a single magpie.

This is turn reminded me of a bit in Naseem Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness (one of the best things I have read lately) where he talks about falling prey to a similarly irrational supersitition. He got a taxi to work one day, whilst working as a trader, and for once decided to get it to drop him off a block away from work and he walked the rest of the way. That day one of his trading strategies paid off handsomely. The next day he got a taxi to work... and got it to drop him off a block away from the offoce so he could walk the rest of the way. He knew that it was crazy to think that the taxi ride the day before had led to his trading success, but some part of his brain still compelled him to feel it had in some way been a factor.

We are constantly grasping for explanations, even where there don't need to be any.

More dodgy RyanAir advertising

I while back I posted this bit about companies being pulled up for misleading advertising, and everyone's favourite union-haters RyanAir featured quite a bit. Well, they've been at it again, this time the Advertising Standards Authority has banned them from repeating misleading claims about lastminute.com. This is clearly turning into something of a habit!

So I repeat the point that if I was an investor in RyanAir I would be asking some questions. This is a company that clearly has a cowboy streak. It is infamous for its anti-union stance and it is earning itself an equally dubious reputation with regards to the veracity of its advertising. Surely it must make investors wonder what else might be going on?

Advertising is the propaganda of capitalism

A bit off-topic, but it struck me the other day that quite a lot of companies get pulled up for dodgy advertising. The most recent case I noticed was RyanAir (boo hiss) getting banned from repeating its claim that only the "very rich or very slow" get the Eurostar to Brussells, as opposed the glamour of flying with RyanAir. The only problem was that when you factor in the reality that the airports serving both cities are quite a bit out of town, the claim that flying is quicker turns out to be rather unfounded.

That reminded me that RyanAir was also pulled up for claiming that air travel accounts for just 2% of carbon emmissions. Again, a misleading claim.

Then I also spotted this rather excellent ticking off Kraft, for the makers of Dairylea. The firm had claimed one of its Dairylea products aimed at kids was "packed full of good stuff", when they really should have said "packed full of saturated fat and salt", a minor slip.

And to round off the recent run of such stories, HSBC was criticised for running an ad suggesting that their customers would not incur charges for using ATMs overseas, when in fact they would incur charges for using ATMs overseas. You notice the slight difference.

I'm sure we all expect advertisers to put the best possible gloss on what they are offering, but in these cases well-known public companies have run adverts which put across messages that are almost the opposite of the truth. Using the plane is slower, not faster. The food has bad stuff in it, not good stuff. Etc etc.

Maybe this kind of propaganda ought to make it onto the radar of responsible investors? If the company is indulging in such blatant disinformation in public, what's going on behind closed doors?

PS. A quick plug for the ITF Ryan Be Fair campaign site here.