Hair adverts are so easy to parody, that even other adverts pardodied them for a while. This is probably the more famous of the Alan Davies Abbey National campaign adverts.
It actually broke from the theme of the campaign a little bit, which usually focused on Davies’ everyman character facing slightly odd situations, and being able to rely on the simplicity of Abbey National to get him through. Like this one for example.
Or this, more convoluted one.
But every now and then, in the five year run (1997-2002), they did something else genre based.
The campaign was run by Euro RSCG Wnek Gosper, and the ads were getting high numbers in the recall Adwatch metric (40%). This is what Abbey was doing before they turned to Davies.
It’s an impressive piece of film-making, but not a great bit of branding.
For a year after Davies stepped down from the campaign, they kept with the Life’s Complicated Enough slogan, and used real people, before rebooting with this.
A few years later the Abbey was swallowed by by Santander.
