One of the many pitfalls of lockdown is incessantly watching TV – particularly different series.
And watching lots of TV, if it’s not recorded, means – sadly – watching lots of ads. The same ads. Again and again and again.
This had led me to the conclusion… I’m sick of that fucking saccharine Lloyds black horse – the galloping little shit.
I’m talking about this:
The folksy, breathless version of Karen Carpenter’s We’ve Only Just Begun gets right on my tits.
Am I supposed to feel a welling up of emotion for the Lloyds nag?
The whole ad just strikes me as disingenuous. I don’t believe that Lloyds, or their horse, are ‘by your side’ for a second.
They’d snap up any struggling small business in a heartbeat. They’ve got form for it.
No amount of trotting carefully next to a small boy on a bike, or running next to people on a beach, will make me believe otherwise.
The whole thing makes me want to retch.
What does seem to work, however, is dogs.
I love the AA dog and his mission to feel the wind in his fur again.
The Andrex puppy is iconic, although I’m never quite sure what he’s got to do with clean bums.
The Churchill dog seems to be equally iconic and is simply a reimagining of the original nodding dog on the dashboard. Put it this way – it’s inoffensive.
The Vitality sausage dog is a weird one – it’s apropos nothing. What has a sausage dog got to do with health insurance? It’s just cute. But it doesn’t rile me like the Lloyds horse does.
The Just Eat dog seems to have been just for Christmas and not for life, as the old adage goes. It has relevance (Snoop Dogg) and works for me.
The only other animal I can think of, in adverts at the moment, is the Money Supermarket bull. It’s a bit daft, but it kinda works. It doesn’t offend anyone and gets across the ‘calm’ messaging – the feeling you get from using Money Supermarket to organise your bills.
I dunno – maybe I’ve got something against horses in general. I did get on one, as a kid, which scared the shit out of me by going off on a gallop – nearly throwing me off.
Whatever the case, I have an extreme aversion to the Lloyds horse – insincere ad-wank.
I couldn’t agree more.
The mind boggles at what sort of person they think is watching this schmaltz-fest thinking “Yes, Lloyds has got my back. I’ll bank with them”.
As for “…by the side of a nation which stands together…”, the UK is patently more divided now than at any point in the last hundred years. I get the whole, we’re all co-operating in the fight against COVID but there are some pretty fierce positions taken on that as well.
But dogs, yes – simple creatures which won’t easily act as metaphors for banks with delusions of grandeur.