New commercial for Totally Workwear.

Totally Workwear is a national chain of stores specialising in, well, tradies' workwear. Boots, reflective vests, drill shorts and the like. The retail experience in TWW is somewhat different to that of other stores; because they're on the clock, customers don't want to stuff around chatting to staff, and the simple layouts of TWW stores reflect this. From there, the positioning line 'Get What You Want then Get Back To Work'is only a short hop.

Pacific Brands paid the bills, Fenton Stephens created the opportunity and we wrote and directed the spot.

There's also some nice radio spots, which we'll post later...

The power of music.

The late Paul Arden once said that music is 50% of your script. Monty Propps' treatment of the Diff'rent Strokes titles proves it.

“Man’s greatest fear is not being inadequate, but powerful beyond measure”

There is a place for every brand in the universe, if only it has the courage to be something. Even if that brand's name is Joel Bauer.

New Work (sort of)

Our good friends at Fenton Stephens scored an invite on the Gruen Transfer. The brief? To sell synchronised swimming as a participant sport to teenage boys. Last count on the Gruen website had the Fenton boys as clear winners.

0.25% Compassion.

Every now and then we get asked to prepare an advertising campaign for a bank and generally the marketing problem is the same; 'people think we're money-grubbing pricks'.

Now partly this is a perception issue; banks do perform an essential function in society and do a lot of good. But the rest of the time, they have a tendency to behave like, well, money-grubbing pricks.

It's something they don't like to hear.

Take yesterday's interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank. To manage the ravages of the global financial crisis, in a climate of crumbling industry and lost jobs, the governers of the nation's monetary policy decide to reduce interest rates by 0.25%.

The aim of this policy was to reduce the financial pressure on households and get them spending again, to speed the economic recovery.

This event was widely reported, and the nation's families were eagerly anticipating the cut.

And the reponse of the banks? To keep most if not all of the cut as profit. Westpac, ANZ and CBA passed on just 0.1% of the cut while NAB passed on nothing at all.

The RBA fired it's best shot in the locker, only to see it almost entirely absorbed into the bottom lines of the Big Four banks, who've taken advantage of the GFC by buying up smaller lending institutions and consolidating their oligopoly on home mortgages.

The recession, and the near-perfect exchange of information enabled by the internet, has made this high-handed behaviour unacceptable to the modern consumer. As the article in the Economist says, it's compassion that people are looking for in brands now, not vaucous statements.

If you're going to behave this way, why bother running ads like the one below? You're treating your customers as less than stupid. And in the end, your bank's brand will be the one to pay.