Money well flushed

Trashing a marketing campaign as a waste of resources is a pretty easy, even facile, argument in most businesses' cases. When it comes to financial services companies in the recessionary year of 2009, however, I think a strong case can be made. Especially when rotoscoping is involved. So, here's brokerage house Charles Schwab pretending like they understand (and weren't partly the cause of) your financial predicament:



Man: When I think of the mess we're in right now, it's just not right.

I love the vague generalizations throughout this ad about the recession. No one comes out and says "When I think about the fact that we're in a recession" or "When I think about how the Dow has lost half its value in less than two years." I get that they aren't buying commercial time to bum people out, but this just rings hollow to me.

Graphic: Last year over 225,000 people didn't just accept it.

"They pulled the money they were losing in their retirement funds and lost it with us instead."

Face it, unless Charles Schwab offers a money market account, anyone trading stocks with Schwab lost money. Everyone has lost money in the stock market, except Warren Buffet and like three other people. It wasn't just investment bankers losing that cash, it was regular people making trades online, too.

Woman: We had our whole retirement in place and then it just went boom. You know, just up in smoke.

Where was that retirement money that went "boom" invested? The stock market. Where does Charles Schwab want you to put it? The stock market. Ahh -- logic!

Graphic: They did something about it.

"It's so much more fun when you control where your money goes down the drain!"

Man: Well I'm still being nickled and dimed, you know, like I, like I haven't lost enough already.

To me, this is the only strong part of this commercial. Charles Schwab is a lot cheaper than most places if you want to be a hands-on investor. This is probably the biggest selling point for their business in this economy.

I'm not a financial guru in any way, but it strikes me as irresponsible to appeal to people's anger at the financial industry and convince them to reinvest by themselves. This is a wildly volatile market, and if most investment firms can't read it, why would normal, non I-banker people fare any better?

Woman: One of my friends are (sic) still kind of having a hard time, and instead of dwelling on the past, I think it's time to move forward.

Utterly vapid. Truly, you have to wonder why this particular, meaningless comment was worth rotoscoping. And using up 5 seconds of air time. Also, only "one" of your friends is having a hard time? And you somehow came out totally unscathed from the financial turmoil? Maybe we should be investing with you, and not Charles Schwab.

Graphic: DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT

"DUMP YOUR MONEY INTO THE STOCK MARKET RIGHT NOW! IT CAN'T GET ANY LOWER!! Unless of course it does, in which case, we totally ran an ad telling you to buy bonds."

I wonder if there's a publicly traded rotoscoping studio I could buy some shares of....

A campaign dimly

Another campaign that seems to run a lot during the sporting events I watch - possibly because the main demographic is working males - is Charles Schwab's "Why the Hell is this Rotoscoped" series of ads. Below, one of many examples, although it's far from the worst, mostly because this guy doesn't move around too much:



Other, and worse, examples can be found here.

So, the big question: why is this rotoscoped? Schwab's VP of advertising claims that the cartoons force people to focus on what's being said. Does anyone agree with that? Because it seems to me to have the exact opposite effect - the animation makes motion look jerky and unnatural, people's mouths look weird as they talk, and the Uncanny Valley effect - the more realistic something that isn't real gets, the more turned off we are - is in full force. The animation is too close to reality to be escapist, yet not realistic enough to be familiar. Instead it's just creepy. How is distracting me with freakish-looking, oddly-moving people supposed to let me concentrate on your message? When I see one of these ads, I don't think, "You know, that guy is making a lot of sense." I think, "OH MY GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH HIS FACE??"

Yet this explanation doesn't seem like a put-on, as it shouldn't - it's not like rotoscoping is just a switch on a camera. You really have to want to do it. (Maybe someone at Schwab is just a big Richard Linklater fan - Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly in particular, of course.) I'm still left wondering how anyone at Schwab actually believes what they're saying, though. If I was watching a regular ad with a bald, middle-aged guy sitting there talking about investment, what exactly is distracting me from his message that weird-looking animation isn't going to repeat?

The real answer, I would guess, is that the rotoscoping serves no purpose whatsoever - other than to get people talking about the rotoscoping. If it were a guy sitting there, you probably would forget all about it as soon as it ended. But if it's a creepily-animated guy sitting there... well. And there are articles about the campaign all over the web, the gist of most of them being "Have you seen these Schwab ads? Craaaaaazy!" So let's not pretend it "focuses the message." Schwab doesn't care if you remember anything the guy was saying as long as you remember the name Schwab and know that they're connected with investing. Which is about all I do remember. That, and that I will leave the room whenever one of these freaky ads comes on. Seriously, what the hell.