Wonderful crap

Translation: don't fall for percentages (the city is calles Percentages)

First of all, I´m usually not the type of guy who says bad things about work of others. I´m perfectly aware of the fact that difficult clients, agency politics or a bad creative day can lead to bad work. I think it´s also too easy to say something negative about an ad. For that refrained from showing a lot of bad German ads I saw in the subways of Hamburg last year. For the work above I´d like to make an exception. The reason is that I´m not completely negative about this work.

The client is a bank. The translation of the poster is ´don´t fall for percentages´. It means that the interest banks have to offer are not always a good reason to join a bank. Not a bad message. How did the creatives solve it? By showing two people who actually fell in front of a (real existing) city called Percentages. Don't fall for percentages! Get it?

An ad like this is considered total crap in advertising. I'll explain why. Instead of adding something to the message with the photograph, the creatives decided to make the text literally in the visual. In other words: the photograph has no function at all. It's only there to make a joke.

Nevertheless, I laughed for half an hour about this ad. Even when I was home. I have to say that I'm a big fan of everything that's pulp. To give an example: I truly enjoy the strange Japanese commercials in Cannes, no matter how bad they are. This one is so crap that it becomes funny again. And it's always better than making a boring ad that nobobdy reads, so this ad is probably more effective than average.

Does anybody know who made this wonderful piece of crap? And whether the creatives were aware of the fact that it's so bad that it becomes good? (I think they knew. The photography is actually quite good and it's a big client. The creatives can't be that bad).This kind of stuff makes me curious. And it also makes me laugh. I'll repeat: I'm not just negative. I'm not even sarcastic. I mean every word I said in this post. And why not? It's better to laugh a little about each others work than to be negative behind someone's back.