ANZ’s creative account under review
The creative account for ANZ is currently under review, Mumbrella can reveal.
Mumbrella understands the pitch process, being run out of Melbourne, is up to the shortlist stage.
The pitch follows ANZ’s appointment of a new head of marketing and brand strategy, Kjetil Undhjem, in March.
Simon Baker was a stroke of genius by Scott at the time – great use of celebrity/TV character and link with ‘We Live In Your World’ positioning.
It was big brand stuff.
Every other piece of shown in this article is a one-off tactic. Big on awards, but very weak on brand building.
Hopefully whoever wins will provide ANZ the big brand platform it so desperately needs.
I used to work at TBWA. Simon Baker drove ad recognition. And did a job in driving brand awareness in Asia. But stopped there. It was an expensive and inflexible campaign that did the Asia PAC job it set out to do. But bank advertising needs to serve many masters and drive a diverse range of products to a broad range of customers. When I last checked – ANZ is still running with its “On top of your money” brand promise – which seems to have been a consistent platform for quite a few years. And “Every other piece“ in this article shows a consistent and purpose driven approach to community work that is rare in our industry. @TBWA – ignore the haters and may common sense prevail.
Correct. Simon Baker was meant for Australasia.
And it worked
GayTM – great bit of fun – but outside of Sydney and the ad industry – who knows about?
And for the record, I’m not a hater – I believe Simon Baker was a brilliant solution at the time and I’m yet to see anything since that clearly positions or differentiates ANZ to the masses.
Are the other banks much better? Not really; but for the $10m+ pa agencies get paid by banks each year, ANZ should expect a bit more for their money.
Nothing TBWA has done on ANZ even comes close to the work M&C did with the ANZ Grow campaign in the 2000’s.
That was branding building at its finest. A simple, well crafted proposition that worked at product, brand and emotion level.
In fact, ANZ could happily bring it back in the current climate where the government mantra is return to growth!
I worked in the marketing team at ANZ for many years. I am not surprised by this. So many of our partners (both internally and externally) complained about TBWA’s inability to collaborate with anyone. They are bulldozers. They don’t listen to anyone. They are right and everyone else is wrong (including the research team), it was embarrassing to watch.
Do we know if this review was precipitated by TBWA\’s recent appointment to Coles Financial Services?
Doubt it
Simon Baker was just borrowed interest; a celebrity fronting a brand. These other campaigns are purely tactical and tokenistic. Where’s the real differentiation for ANZ? What does the brand even stand for? It only has to set itself apart from 3 other banks – how hard can that be? TBWA is supposed to be the ‘disruption’ agency, but when it comes to ANZ they’d failed on that front. Nothing disruptive for the ANZ brand about any of this work, just disappointment.
How hard can it be to differentiate from 3 other banks? There are 4 full retail banks in Aus only because the government mandated it decades ago. Every other capital intensive industry in Australia has let the market decide. I reckon it would be impossible to differentiate them besides the superficial approach – ie one is blue, one is red, one is yellow etc. Love to see your disruptive approach (BTW is ANZ even a challenger brand so does it need to be disruptive?) better to disrupt. Or are you just having a go at TBWA?
Seriously Simon Baker and Grow? Get with the times people. TBWA (Post Whybin) are fantastic partners. Highly collaborative, flexible and a modern creative agency always looking for ways to help us do better. Their recent financial well-being work is seeing fantastic results across the board and for the first time since we launched Apple Pay – we’re seeing our brand image pull away from the others.
You miss the point.
Simon Baker was right for the time and the brief.
It faced into the brand positioning of ‘we live in your world’ and tried to make something of it.
‘Grow’ is a timeless, universal consumer driver when it comes to finances. I’m simply unable to recall anything as powerful for ANZ of late. An image.A theme. A piece of music. Anything. ANZ may be doing well, but the world is going through enormous change. Jobs aren’t as secure. Incomes are at risk. House prices are down (negative equity). It’s natural for customers to seek a financial health check from big, secure institutions as much as they’re fleeing to independent home lenders for lower mortgage rates. My point is that I believe the ANZ could be doing better if they actually stood for something and had a platform to drive that home. As of now – I’m not sure where ANZ sits and who it’s for.
GayTM – great. Other one-offs – great. But they’re the easy bits – it’s clearly positioning the brand to the masses, not the ad industry that will drive success. As boring as it is, the relentless customer-focused repetitiveness of ’That’s why I pick Woolies’ – has done just that for Woolies. If you disagree that ANZ doesn’t need a similar platform, fine – but please don’t accuse me and others who see ANZ advertising as a collection of ‘one/offs’ with no commonality of purpose as living in the past. Some would say that’s what ANZ are guilty of – trying to recreate the big bling days of GayTM at the expense of creating a contemporary master brand positioning and leveraging that via a big flexible comms platform.
Brilliantly said.
I haven’t noticed any recent campaigns other than some work targeting the LGBTI community which struck me at the time as being both tone deaf and clichéd. If this is what you mean by ‘getting with the times’ I’m not sure it’s working. Hats off to you for so staunchly and enthusiastically defending your agency and their fantastic results though.
I hear it’s moving to CHEP. They’d be better off staying with TBWA. Or going back to M&C. This brand needs a shithot creative solution from a shithot creative agency to solve its lack of brand differentiation and rebuild its customers trust. Not a bunch of data analysts. TBWA may not have been able to crack it yet but doesn’t mean they can’t. I’d put my money of them and their creative chops any day over CHEP and its painting by numbers.
Can’s see how the NAB contract would allow for this. Or ANZ’s for that matter.