What happens when you ask a group of children if they’d consider becoming a banker when they grow up? Pretty much what you’d expect (a resounding no).
That’s what agency Duval Guillaume found in its recent spot for Belgian Financial Sector Federation Febelfin. The spot opens with interviewers asking kids what they want to be when they grow up. Responses vary from the expected (policeman, singer tennis player, adventurer, ballerina) to the unusual (“Later, I want to become a piece of furniture”). In the second half of the video, they move on to asking the children if they’d consider becoming a banker, and all answer in the negative. Some are more harsh than others (“They have no friends”) but all seem to agree that they have no interest in banking. The spot concludes with the message, “If we don’t change our reputation today, we’ll have no banking tomorrow,” which is a bit of a logical fallacy since plenty of people end up settling for a career they had no intention of entering as a child. Still, it’s very true that banking needs to clean up its reputation and Duval Guillaume manages to find an entertaining way at delivering what could easily be a very dry message.