See how easily freaks can take over your life
Febelfin
Issue 28 | September 2013
Agency
Duval Guillaume
Creative Team
Executive Creative Directors: Geoffrey Hantson, Katrien Bottez Digital Strategy: Kris Hoet, Maarten Vanherck Copywriter: Vincent Daenen Art Director: Kristoff De Prins
Production Team
Agency Producer: Marc Van Buggenhout Production Company: Caviar Director: Tom Willems Producers: Leslie Verbist, Audrey Dierickx
Other Credits
Client: Pamela Renders, Wien De Geyter
Date
June 2013
Background
Febelfin is the Federation of Belgian Financial Services companies. They represent the industry to consumers by providing information, comment and counsel.
They wanted to follow up on the success of their ‘Mind Reader’ video, which won a Gold Lion at Cannes (featured in Directory 25) warning the public never, ever to share their financial data, not even by telephone.
The message they wanted to get across was that everyone needed to be vigilant with personal information.
Idea
The intention of the campaign was to demonstrate what internet criminals can do with your data. ‘See how easily freaks can take over your life’ showed an actor taking over the identity and life of an innocent victim through the information the victim had made freely available.
Internet criminals had been ‘phoning people and pretending to be employees from their banks, trying to obtain their response code, i.e. their personal internet banking signatures.
Though this kind of fraud damaged the bank as well as the customer, customers are obliged to protect themselves.
Results
Newest Febelfin campaign got over 466.421 views in Belgium. The campaign also created quite some buzz in both
local press and international blogs. More than 250 blogs wrote an article about the video. Some of the blogs that mentioned the video include:
http://mashable.com/2013/07/09/belgian-bank-ad-online-identity/
http://www.fastcocreate.com/1683371/guard-your-online-identity-or-an-ad-firm-might-steal-your-face
http://gizmodo.com/wildly-creepy-belgian-psa-actually-stole-someones-iden-744130523
This is provisional as the campaign is still running.
Our Thoughts
One of the big themes at Cannes this year was storytelling. In the old days, TV advertising told stories about the product but nowadays brands engage better when they tell stories about people. Duval Guillaume are the masters of this format of what I call candid camera advertising. Candid Camera was a TV show, much copied around the world, which played pranks on ordinary people, filming what happened.
In this YouTube film, Febelfin tell one of the oldest stories of all, the imposter and fake. Dumas’ ‘Man In The Iron Mask’ retold here as the man with a latex nose.
The storyteller is sufficiently weird to hold attention in the first moments of the film before horrible fascination takes over and keeps you watching as Tom Degroote buys an antique harp he never wanted.