Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Birth of a Brand

I love RBC's current ad campaign. I love the artwork and I love that they're using cartoon characters ... and after leafing through the current issue of Strategy magazine, I especially love that it was my idea.

Ever since the campaign began, I've been wondering if it was related to my work, since the character styles seem similar to cartoons I've been drawing for the bank since 2004. According to the Strategy article, the current campaign "evolved" from that stuff.

The first time I pitched a (rejected) cartoon to RBC was way back in 2001. I mocked up an illustrated version of their lion mascot for a colleague's web project. I wasn't illustrating much back then, so I'd try to squeeze cartoons into any project I could.

But RBC cartoons didn't happen until the start of 2004 when I worked as a designer with Benchmark on an internal RBC project. Originally, cartoons weren't even on the table. Instead, the design was going to use cut-out stock photos of people.

As usual, I wanted to do cartoons and and this seemed like a project where they might fit so I pitched a cartoon option. There were legitimate concerns that cartoons would seem 'childish' and 'not serious' but the point of the project was to break from the past and cartoons seemed like a good way to do that and engage people in a friendly manner. To get past objections, I described the artwork as "New Yorker-styled" cartoons for adults, not Saturday morning cartoons for kids. I threw around that "New Yorker" reference everywhere I could.

My big regret from my time at Hot Docs was that I was never able to get past the 'childish' objections to cartoons and push through an illustrated campaign, which would have been more appropriate there than at the bank! The closest I came was the bland papier mache globe artwork which failed because the earliest drafts (which featured a full diorama with the sky and clouds, etc.) were rejected as being too 'childish'-looking and I never managed to come up with an equivalent "New Yorker-styled" defense.

Anyhow, back to the bank. We received the go-ahead to try some cartoons to see what might be possible while continuing with the photo cut-outs so we'd have something to fall back when the cartoons flopped. But the cartoons didn't flop. The early roughs of the cartoons looked promising compared to the photos, so we moved ahead:

And developed them:

At that time I was still doing my newspaper cartoons in ink on paper and had no idea how to draw on computer with a tablet. So, as I was developing the drafts, I was also relearning how to draw (which is partly why I kept the characters simple).

When the initial brochure appeared, people liked the cartoon approach and more cartoons were drawn for internal posters, training manuals and later, even animated characters for videos and computer training programs. I've done a few sets of cartoons for the bank every year ever since, even though the original project ended a few years back.

As my computer drawing skills improved, newer characters strayed from the simplicity of the earlier drawings as you can see from this construction worker, created last month. The ad campaign has reminded me that the simplicity of the earlier characters actually works better than the newer stuff.

Banks ads usually feature photos of happy, pretty people walking into bank branches and buying houses and cars. When you compare the RBC ads to any other bank creative, you can really see that they've gone out on a limb with the cartoons. Creative types live to do the kind of work you see in those ads, but companies -- especially banks! -- rarely give you the opportunity to do something really different and fun. And they're not just cartoons, they pulled out all the stops in amazing pieces like this muffin commercial:

Ummm .... ok, except it doesn't happen that way in real life. In real life, the little muffin businessman plunks along uncredited while a big ad agency revises his recipe and cashes in. And then the muffin man briefly toots his own horn on a post on his blog ... but if he's lucky, he has recipes for more than just muffins.

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