A ‘savings’ account should live up to its name, says Standard Chartered Bank

Standard Chartered Bank has released its first TV campaign for the Indian market. The TVC created by TBWA\India goes on air on 26 February and will run for six to eight weeks.

The pan-India campaign will also straddle print, radio and outdoor.

The film starts with a view of the letter boxes in a building with names written on them. This sets the context for the film based on the theme of living up to one’s name. A trendy young man introduced as Naveen (meaning ‘new’) walks down the stairs. As soon as he spots a black cat crossing his path, he steps back. A voice over explains the contradiction in his name and his orthodox behaviour based on the superstition that it’s a bad omen for a black cat to cross one’s path. The next character is a beautiful young woman named Bulbul. But when she speaks, her voice is a far cry from that of the namesake bird. Likewise, there is a man named Hari, but he is painfully slow at his work. The film ends introducing Standard Chartered Banks’ savings accounts, with the promise that it stays true to its name and actually helps save money. It ends with the voice over ‘Jaisa naam waisa kaam’.

On the campaign, Rahul Ghosh, group creative director, TBWA\India, said, “The campaign is extremely product-driven. Currently, there are a lot of TVCs using emotional appeal but we decided to stay rooted to the product. We have seen that in most banks the savings account has been a vanilla product where consumers are not actually saving money through it. So we wanted to highlight that at Standard Chartered the savings account helps people save money and is not just a parking lot.”

The TV campaign comprises two films around the same creative thought, laced with humourous instances. Watch the second film here (story continues):

On the creative brief, Ghosh said, “So we stumbled upon an idea, that people are named after certain attributes but not all live up to the names. This was the creative idea and we wanted to prove a point that Standard Chartered is a brand that actually lives up to its name.”

Also read: ‘We are now taking a different view of communicating the proposition to our clients’: Q&A with Sanjeeb Chaudhari, regional head South Asia and global head of marketing (consumer bank), Standard Chartered Bank