Dear HSBC,
Here is an advertisement your bank released in today’s edition of HT Business. I found this ad perplexing at multiple levels, and wanted to have a chat with you about it.
Let’s start with the sardar wearing a kilt. Groan stereotype groan. With a bar on top telling you the location, I feel it wasn’t necessary. Not everyone in Scotland wears a kilt.
What really baffles me is the heading:
Living below the equator doesn’t mean you won’t be recognized above it.
Newsflash, dear HSBC – no part of India is “below the equator”, definitely no part of India where non-kilt-wearing Punjab da puttars live. You, HSBC, started off as Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and are now headquartered in London. None of the cities – Hong Kong, Shanghai, London – are “below the equator” either, so you can’t weasel out using that excuse.
For an ad marketing premium banking services to a geographically displaced traveller (probably people you refer to internally in the bank as “high-value customers”, as if they are some sort expensive cattle to be reined in within a ranch), [start sarcasm] this ad inspires great confidence in you bank’s capabilities [end sarcasm]. Do you know how intelligent you come off as in this ad, HSBC? You sound as if a bunch of hillbilly rednecks who “dun ‘now no thang ’bout this geology thang”.
What’s that I hear you say, HSBC? Your employees didn’t make this ad? You hired an ad agency to do it? Well then, surely somebody in your company would have at least looked at an ad you were going to spend millions funding, right? Right?
It would have worked in Australia. It would have worked in South Africa. India? I think not.
Until the next time then, HSBC, or perhaps, never…
Love and kisses,
Ankur x
PS – It would be so fucking ironic, dear HSBC, if my blog started showing ads from your bank around this blog post. You may have a laugh about that at my expense. kthxbai.
Update: Someone from an IP address belonging to ‘HSBC Bank Plc, London’ has been reading this page for over six hours today. Maybe they’d want to fill out the butthurt report form.
18 replies on “Open letter to Whoever-The-Fuck-Created-This-HSBC-Ad”
They’re dumb.
But why are you getting so worked up over it? :/
Erm, joke?
Huh?
Okay this is strange. I replied to your comment, Ankur. And it doesn’t show. So I tried to reply again and it says “Duplicate comment detected.” 😐
Seems like your comment had gone to the spam queue. Brought it back now. And yeah, WordPress does throw up an error if you type in exactly the same comment more than once.
As I was saying. I thought this ad was good comedy material, and thus I wrote this blog post. I was motivated enough to do so because such a grossly ‘wrong’ ad is just taking a piss.
Yeah your letter was funny, but it seemed in a few places like you were personally getting offended. 😛