The campaign will break on television on October 21, 2005 when the first of four new TV adverts will be aired. The TV campaign will be supported by extensive national press advertising as well as the use of 2000 outdoor poster sites.
The new brand positioning will be based around 'Inventive Spirit', highlighting the good ideas and creative thought that Barclays staff use to help customers. The TV adverts will not be using any Hollywood stars just ordinary jobbing actors.
They will increasingly try to engage with customers in a warm and witty way that will make Barclays seem more accessible to the public. The adverts will aim to make consumers smile and the new strap-line, "Barclays, now there's a thought", is designed to encourage customers and potential customers to consider Barclays when purchasing anything from car insurance to a current account.
Jim Hytner, group marketing director, who joined from ITV just over a year ago, said "After much internal consultation and research we established that Barclays staff are incredibly proud of its history of firsts (first cash machine in the world, first credit card in the UK) but more importantly the staff's ability to continually innovate and come up with ideas that benefit customers at a local level, whether its opening a branch earlier or ensuring more staff are available at local peak periods.
"Over the last six months we have presented these ideas to over 10,000 staff at a series of our chief executive's road-shows. We set up electronic voting and asked all of them whether we were heading in the right direction - over 95 per cent agreed that we were. With their buy in to the brand positioning we are now able to go public with an advertising campaign, however, it will be when customers enter a branch, or speak to Barclays on the phone, that the true test of our brand will occur."
The first advert to be aired is called Invisicard, to be followed by Orb, Napkin and Cybot. Each of the ads will focus in an exaggerated way on the creativity of Barclays' people, and the proof point will be a much more down to earth way in which Barclays helps its customers. For example, Invisicard will focus on how a Barclays employee develops a new invisible debit card that is virtually theft proof. Whilst hugging a colleague in celebration of the invention the invisible card is knocked on to the floor and lost. The proof point being that we might not have invented the Invisicard yet but we have put in place many fraud busting ideas for customers.
The adverts were created by Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) and Starcom Motive is the media buyer. In addition to the four TV ads there will be three press ads which will run for six weeks and four outdoor posters that will be placed at 2000 outdoor sites for two weeks.
