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"That ad campaign cost too much." No **** Sherlock.

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When I blogged about the John Lewis Christmas ad a few weeks ago – the one featuring the hare and the bear…and the despair of the rather wet Lily Allen cover of Keane’s ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ – a lot of people balked at the cost of the campaign. It’s true that, at £7m, it didn’t come cheap.

But then again, with the animation designed by a team that included Aaron Blaise (supervising animator on Disney classics including The Lion King and Pocahontas), you can see where the money went. And let’s not forget that, last year, the company’s Christmas campaign contributed to an overall year-on-year sales increase for John Lewis of 44.3% in the five weeks leading up to Christmas Day. So, the £7m this year was money well spent.

On the flipside, however, I have been slightly baffled recently by the two ads I’ve heard on the radio for the FSCS – the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. In the unlikely event that you don’t know who they are or what they do, the FSCS protects the likes of you and me by providing up to £85,000 of deposits per saver if our bank or building society goes bust.

Right, so we know what they do – and we thank them for it. But here’s what I don’t quite get:

1.) Do I need a radio ad to tell me what they do? After all, given recent history, you’d have to have been living in a cave not to know about Northern Rock and RBS et al, and the government bailing out financial institutions.

2.) Even if I do need to be told what the FSCS does, it’s not like they’re selling me a product. So what are they advertising? They’re simply making me aware that they exist in case my bank goes caboom…but they’re not selling me anything. And as above, doesn’t everybody know all this anyway? And if they don’t, won’t their bank advise them if they DO go caboom?

3.) The radio advertising campaign consisted of two short clips. No Hollywood-level animation, no particularly clever scripting – just an actor reading out what the FSCS do (which largely consisted of comparing them to a crash helmet and a padlock). And yes, granted, they did get the chocolate-voiced Benedict Cumberbatch to read out the lines. He’s jolly good, I’ll give him that. If ever there was a nice avuncular voice to offer comfort and reassurance that the FSCS will be there if or when my bank drops my £85,000 down the tubes, then Benedict’s is the one you want to hear…

But how on EARTH does that amount to an advertising campaign budget of £3 million?!

I really struggle to understand what they spent it on. Yes, I’m sure the campaign goes way beyond Sherlock telling us that our dosh is clunk-click safe, and they undoubtedly produced bucket loads of other marketing literature and so on…but £3 million?!

The FSCS is funded by a levy on financial firms – and this could be passed on to consumers. But the organisation has defended the £3m price tag, stating that the financial services industry spends far more than this per year on advertising and marketing, and emphasises that it equates to less than 0.5% of the whole budget. Wow, them is some deep pockets.

"This campaign has the support of the industry organisations and trade bodies who see benefits in consumers being more aware of FSCS protection,” the organisation said. “The costs of the campaign are shared across the full range of financial services and do not result in a large bill for any firm."

Even if that’s the case, I ask you: three million quid? Really? Advice really isn’t cheap, is it?

by Ashley Morrison

Ashley is a copywriter, editor and blogger

Follow him on Twitter

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