Brenda Atkinson
MIXED MEDIA
I saw the new Nedbank TV commercial again the other night. Not having grasped the crux of this ad before, I hopefully scrutinised each frame, waiting for the clue that would tie up this skillfully crafted mystery of a small black child leading a blind old white man towards a new horizon, one across which buck leap at an African dawn.
I waited, but nothing. I mentally ran through Nedbank’s previous TV commercials, recalling soft sunshine, and gambolling kittens that metamorphosed into powerful African cats. My emotional memory triggered those things that I’ve generally associated with the brand: Nedbank comes across as clever, financially sound, and slightly superior, but never at the expense of social caring and innovation. So what does this new ad want us to believe?
The next day a friend put it more plainly: “What’s up with Nedbank?” he asked, as if I should know. Grumbling that they were “losing the plot”, he walked off irritably, prompting me to conduct a spot survey on what people thought of the ad. “Don’t get it,” said a few. “It’s about the ‘African renaissance’,” said some others. “I think it’s an overly sentimental picture of the New South Africa,” scoffed someone else.
And then the plot thickened: a few people suggested that its real meaning, cleverly embedded in the powerful emotional clichs of a victoriously emerging new nation, in fact referred to the controversial Standard Bank merger. In this scenario, they suggested, Nedbank was the politically correct representative of a “new African dawn”, leading the old regime towards an insight achieved through contact and exposure.
When I call Alan Bunton, chair of Ogilvy & Mather Gauteng and originator of the commercial, I am gently but firmly steered into the position of interviewee, asked for a full 10 minutes to deliver my own analysis. What Bunton himself finally delivers is a half-hour philosophical discourse on emotion, humanism, fine art and advertising.
A veteran of the ad industry and an inspiring thinker, Bunton, together with creative director Peter Badenhorst, has nursed the Nedbank account to a position of some power, largely by mining value systems that have the ability to move people, one way or another.
“Our work for Nedbank has always used metaphor and allegory,” he offers.
“In my head the man and boy commercial was about positing a set of values going into the new year; about putting a flag in the ground in terms of what the organisation represents. The interpretations I’ve heard are interesting because I left it very open – it’s the most ambiguous of the Nedbank ads to date and I wanted it that way.”
Bunton’s philosophy is about exploring a kind of advertising which he sees as underused and underestimated – the kind that doesn’t rely on a punchline, but which, like a work of art that moves the viewer without them knowing why, can be powerful across a range of interpretations.
That’s all very well, but isn’t equating an ad with a Titian painting just a bit over the top? Doesn’t ambiguity do a disservice to the brand by obscuring its message? “Who says you have to follow a certain path to a specific proposition?” Bunton fires back. “This kind of advertising mines a whole new area: the issue here is, what kind of emotional response do you want from what audience and why? What stimuli would trigger those emotions? An ad, like music, can move you on the basis of an emotional thing you don’t understand but which you know you like, and I’m increasingly interested in that component,” he explains. “I don’t know how much you should try to rationalise what might be hidden; not because there’s a sinister message but because it can destroy the mystery of the thing.”
When news of the proposed Standard Bank merger first hit the headlines, I went into a large Standard Bank branch and found painful examples of corporate defensiveness going as internal public relations. Tacked up variously and in plain view of Standard Bank clients were ink-jet printed posters denouncing the merger through clumsy punning. “Dis NED nie krieket nie,” said one, the Standard Bank blue of the text self-righteously framing the green “NED”.
This kind of reactionary, internally generated “advertising”, apparently designed to cheerlead the staff into fierce and loyal opposition, underlines the importance of continuity for any brand. In the banking stakes, it is Nedbank which seems to have the edge, leading through a campaign which is in fact continuous in how it taps universal emotion.
According to Bunton, he has been besieged by callers, some confessing that the commercial moves them to tears, others expressing their optimism for a South Africa characterised by harmony and compassion.
Whether the ad, seamlessly put together by director Iain Campbell, is a warm affirmation of one country’s future or, as Bunton puts it, ” a political statement about leading the moribund few to enlightenment”, it marks an intriguing moment in local advertising. It outstrips the beautifully filmed and conceptually clever Old Mutual “Green Line” TV commercial in terms of emotional impact, perhaps precisely because it refuses to deliver a punchline.