Beware The Bear

ANZ’s ever-active cards division is at it again – turning out a quirky ad in a bid to put some daylight between itself and the other card vendors in the fiercely competitive Australian credit card market.

The division’s latest television campaign has been running for a few weeks and takes a humourous look at the issue of replacing stolen or lost credit cards.

The campaign, which involves one of ANZ’s own staff being shot with an animal tranquiliser during a brainstorming session, follows on from the bank’s earlier ‘falcon’ campaign.

To set the scene, staff are assembled at a meeting and are devising ways to improve the turnaround time for replacing lost or stolen ANZ credit cards.

The animated manager calls on his troops to undertake a role-play of a situation whereby a card could very well be lost or stolen, to which a conscientious staff member nominates Dubbo’s holy grail tourist attraction – the Western Plains Zoo.

By doing so, the woman inadvertently relegates a colleague to the role of credit card victim and the thief? The latter is none other than an engaged bear from the zoo, appropriately cast as Simon, the largest of the staff members present.

Simon’s response to being type-cast in the bear suit – “Why am I always the bear”, is arguably the highlight of the commercial.

The thieving bear is then shot in the neck with a tranquiliser gun by a diligent member of the Credit Card Replacement “taskforce”, who takes his job to the next level, effectively rendering his colleague unconscious.

The manager is then seen to glance at his watch, smugly acknowledging the swift turnaround in recovering Wendy’s stolen card, before checking the pulse of the fallen bear – Simon.

The creative is such that the message could almost be lost to consumers’, however the concept is so dissimilar and unconventional to what we have grown to expect from banks, that this particular sequence of events will no doubt resonate longer with many consumers.

Some might argue that ads such as these are a little low brow, perhaps, but it is certainly effective.

The last time a bear was used to such good effect in an ad campaign was arguably in 1984 when the then US Republican Party presidential candidate Ronald Reagan ran his “bear in the woods” campaign.

The ad featured a brown bear meandering through a forest as the ‘fear mongering’ narrator talked about how the Soviet Union was posing an imminent threat to global security.

The ad finished with a hunter coming face to face with the bear and the tagline showing:

“President Reagan: Prepared for Peace.”

For Australia’s major banks there is no time for peace – as they say “it’s a jungle out there!”