Lloyd's Bank employs horsepower for 250th anniversary campaign

Lloyd's Bank, which has long used a black horse icon, has created 60- and 90-second TVCs that show noble steeds doing all kind of good deeds, from helping fight fires and wars to delivering milk and brides. The work is in celebration of the bank's 250th anniversary, and the vignettes in the videos begin in 1765, the year of the bank's founding.

Ad Nut will spare you the usual complaint about how every kind of animal besides the squirrel gets to be heroic in TVCs and instead complain about the modern-sounding song in use here; it's pretty and there's nothing wrong with it, but it seems out of place with a video that spans such an epic timescale. Lately it seems faddish to use this same sort of music (most often a sparse arrangement with a female singer), along with almost any kind of ad. It's probably an effort to avoid cliches such as soaring orchestral pieces, or perhaps to use the surprise of incongruent music to capture attention. Ad Nut submits that the use of incongruent music will one day look like a cliche itself. This kind of video cries out for epic music and Ad Nut feels cheated to not hear crashing cymbals and piercing trumpets. 

CREDITS

Client: Lloyds Banking Group
Brand: LLoyds
Project name: Horse Story
Client: Ros King/Jean Reddan
Chief Creative Officer Ben Priest
Executive Creative Directors Ben Tollett, Richard Brim
Planner: David Golding
Media agency: MEC
Producer: Matt Craigie/Victoria Bennett
Account Management: Mat Goff/Charlotte Wolfenden
Media planner: Hannah Mcwilliam, Melanie Constant
Production company: Rogue
Director: Sam Brown
Editor: Paul Watts, The Quarry
Soundtrack name and composer: Birdy, Wings
Post-production: The Mill
Audio post-production: Aaron Reynolds, Wave