Financial-service advertisers like to link themselves to a winner, and then to beat the “winning” theme thoroughly into the ground. With its sponsorship of the Chicago Cubs, Nuveen doesn’t have that option — though the team does look promising so far this year. So, a campaign by Fallon in Minneapolis (consisting of outdoor boards in Wrigley Field) instead embraces the century-long travails of Cub fans. Another ad in the series shows a worried fan alongside the headline, “It wouldn’t be a religion if it didn’t test the faith of its followers.” Here, we get a more direct allusion to the fact that there’s presumably no Cubs fan alive that witnessed the team’s last world championship. It must take something of a “buy and hold” temperament to sustain a lifetime of rooting for the Cubs, which may not make those folks the most lucrative customers for a company like Nuveen. But if a brand can bond with people who’ve demonstrated so much loyalty through thick and (mostly) thin, it can reasonably hope to have them as customers for a long, long time. Nuveen takes a good step in that direction with this campaign. –Mark Dolliver
