As far as I know this will only apply to Dopers in the Winnipeg area but…
For a while now, ING Direct has been running commercials in Canada with some guy (and the latest one has a women) telling me about great it would be for me to bank with them. They have accents that I can’t place but seeing as ING is a Dutch company so I would guess that is the accent. Fair enough.
A Winnipeg credit union is now running radio spots that have a heavy scottish accent telling me about why the Winnipeg CU should get my money. WTF???
A Dutch bank commercial having Dutch accent is fine but how did Winnipeg get associated with a Scottish accent? Was there some marketing study that showed that people will deposit money if a foreigner tells them to? I don’t get it.
Has anyone else heard this spot?
Maybe they just figure Canadians are used to taking orders from people on the other side of the pond?
I always wonder about those ING DIRECT ads. Looks like the first part of the sign got chopped off. I always wonder, “what… Banking? Checking? Shopping?” and then I’m past the billboard before I have a chance to see what the actual ad is about.
Here in the States we have a company called AIG. They used to have a huge billboard I drove past several times a week; the company name was over the acronym, so I kept seeing:
That guy is most likely Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. ING uses him for their advertising here in Australia. Connolly loves Australia, is a popular household name here, and comes here often - so the advertising works.
It’s possible ING are being cheapskates and showing you Australian ads, rather than shooting new ones with a person more familiar to Canadians.
I don’t live in Winnipeg, so I haven’t heard the commercial in question, but I have noticed a lot of commercials lately using guys ranting in really, really bad fake Scottish accents, so it may just be part of the current fad. I hope this trend ends soon because while all bad attempts at accents irritate me, bad Scottish accents particularly grate on my nerves, probably because I’m so used to the real thing I can even understand my Glaswegian relatives!
I miss the Dutch guy from ING. In the U.S. they just have little CGI dollar bills running all over the place. Still a good company though (decent interest rates. yay!)
I actually enjoy the guy from the ING commercials. For some reason I like the idea of a Dutch man coming into my TV and attempting (and doing a good job of it) to have me move my assets to a foreign company. The Winnipeg commercial I just can’t stand because I can’t see why they used the accent. I think Ms Macphisto is right. Thinking back there seems to be an increase in accents being used for commercials.
So what is the marketing reason for this? Are we drawn to listen more intently if the message is hard to understand of sounds different to our ears? That may actually make sense :eek:
Scottish apparently is very “hip” right now. Off the top of my head (or is that heed) there is the mini granola guy, Keith’s guy ( more appropriate but still annoying), the weird piece of angry gum and the one where it’s a fake cooking show and he ranting about something (sorry it’s a vague description but the ad/accent is so bad that I usually change the channelit before it gets to the point).
I’d either forgotten or blocked the angry gum one. Another offender is for one of those payday loan places that not only has a guy with a bad Scottish accent, but it plays on the Scottish=cheap stereotype.
The funniest thing is that even the ING commercials here in the Netherlands have an accent. They have some girl from Noord-Brabant with a serious Brabant’s accent doing the commercials here. She has a really sexy voice, but the soft g’s just get me every time. Couldn’t they get someone who speaks ABN (that’s an abbreviation for “Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands” and means “no accent”)? This is like having a Brummy or Geordie do the commercials for HSBC or Barclay’s.
