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Archive: Dec 1, 2001


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Advertising
Compass Bank jars complacency
by: Dec 1, 2001 Print

A new two-spot campaign for Compass Bank puts a spotlight on the increasingly high user fees many banks charge to access money. The spots question the practice of charging for what is yours, and come out of Miami's Crispin Porter Bogusky and are directed by John Curran of Anonymous Content.

Based in the southern and western states, Compass Bank offers free ATM usage to all its clients.

"It's a great program and it almost sells itself, except Compass finds people are complacent about it. We're all lulled into the inevitability at the ATM of paying a fee," says copywriter Scott Linnen. "Our job was to jar people out of this complacency at the ATM by showing them that this was about as ridiculous as paying for anything else you own."

"Cheese" shows a young man completing a transaction over what appears to be a bank machine while smugly saying "Here comes the bread, give Daddy the bacon, show me the cheese." It is revealed that his fridge is charging him a $2.50 access fee to get to his cheese. "But it's my cheese," he whines back to the appliance. "Tube top" follows the trend when a young woman tries to pull her closet door off because it won't let her access to her "cute little tube top" without ponying up.

Shot on location over one day in a Toronto house through Steam, Linnen and art director Amee Shah say they strove for a sense of reality in the spots.

The spots are set up to look like the characters are completing a bank transaction, the reveal being that they are interacting with their home. "The ATM was a functioning prop that we incorporated into the refrigerator and the closet door and had somebody operating the screens through a teleprompter," says Linnen. "We wanted it to get it looking as real as possible rather than doing it in post." Shah adds that a great deal of attention was paid to the small details of the setting, like ensuring the ceiling beams didn't give away the fact that the characters were in a house.

Casting was also integral to the success of the spot so the creatives scoured the Toronto improv scene for the right talent. Perhaps fortuitously, the two women cast for "Tube Top," had the perfect chemistry, as they were actually friends in real life.

Other credits for the campaign include creative director Alex Bogusky and producer David Rolfe.


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