ErinIs…

Charles Schwab commercials have been using the rotoscoping technique in their ads since about 2005. These ads have always annoyed me. I can’t stand the use of animation purely for the sake of using animation.

Advertising Rules #72 – In commercials targeted towards adults (especially middle aged adults), animation should only be used if real live people could not execute the story line more effectively.

Esurance commercis are a great example of when animation helps the message and the spot. There is no way those storylines could be executed with the same tone, message and slickness if real people were used. Charles Schwab, on the other hand, really doesn’t need to animate people’s faces as they sit on a bench in front of a camera and bitch to you. Real live people could pull that off just fine. 

But then there’s Charles Schwab who is trying to sell itself as an upstanding and reliable finance company. Do the cartoonish characters really support the focus of the campaign? The use of less smug and REAL people would be so much more effective.

Talk to Chuck is such a great line and its completely laid to waste after a viewer sees the douchy characters rotoscoped to ultimate creepiness.  

Charles Swchab recently put its $100M media into play, with incumbent Omnicom’s PHD, Universal McCann and Aegis’s Carat all being invited to pitch. How about you put creative into play too? Your media buy is going to remain ineffective so long as your creative is this terrible.

I couldn’t find a recent spot as an example, but this one from 2008 looks exactly the same as the one from this month. 

Based on the youtube comments, I guess I’m not alone in my distaste for rotoscoping…