OddThinking

An Australian bank has an advertising campaign. Its advertisements have been appearing on billboards and in magazines. Some of their advertising images are available online, for the time being at least.

Either the adverts are too poor to hit their mark, or I am not in the targeted demographic, or both.

It is trying to differentiate its credit card services by introducing a new, smaller, credit card.

Yeah, that’s right… The size of the credit card is physically smaller.

No… I don’t know how you’re supposed to fit it in an ATM machine (sic) or in the supermarket card-reader.

After discussing this advert with a few quizzical people, it took Alastair‘s cosmopolitan experience to explain that these credit cards are designed to fit either in a wallet or directly on a key ring. Aaaah! So, why didn’t they say so, in the first place?

Reactions from other people who I would have imagined are in the perfect demographic for a bank’s credit card facility included:

• “Who’s the cootest little credit card in the world? Who’s the cootest?”
• “Oh? I saw those adverts. Are they adverts for credit-cards? I didn’t notice?”

But mostly, the comments centered around the picture of Robert Hooper. Who is Robert Hooper? Apparently, no-one. His photo appears in some of the advertisements, with the name Robert Hooper printed clearly on his credit card. I assumed that he was some B-list celebrity, with whom I was unfamiliar. Instead it just seems to have been a fictional name attached to a model’s photo.

While the model is sporting a few days’ wispy growth around the chin, the rest of his attire is deliberately androgenous; in fact it is downright feminine.

This is a man who is comfortable enough with his sexuality – not that it is any of your business – to not be afraid of wearing his long hair flowing over a low-cut top, accessorised with a necklace.

Most of the comments have been “Is that a man or a woman?”

I thought nothing of it, until I stumbled across his mirror image used as some stock footage while visiting an unrelated web-site I happened to be surfing.

Roberta Hooper, as I now know her, has nothing to do with the web-site content; she is just a standard “this topic is too dry, let’s use a bit of sex appeal to make it interesting – but not so much that anyone will actually complain.”

Look at these two portraits side-by-side, and convince me that these aren’t before-and-after images!