You can’t help thinking of the world of financial services advertising over the years as a very large and very dark coal cellar populated by an awful lot of blindfolded people aiming at an awful lot of invisible dart boards.

No-one’s had much of an idea what they’ve been trying to achieve.  Every now and then – as a result of sheer luck, the law of averages or maybe a secret supply of matches – someone would hit a bulls eye.  But no-one was ever quite sure how they’d done it – not even the people who’d done it themselves – and we’d all go back to chucking our darts all over the place until the next lucky shot.

It wasn’t good, but at least we were all in it together.  Which is why I’m pleased, but also a bit concerned, to find that one group of residents of the coal cellar is showing signs of finding its own private source of illumination.

Recently, agency planners have started coming forward with some really rather interesting insights about the way that financial products and services relate to people’s lives.  For example, even though it played a big part in helping win the business from cchm:ping, I really admired the insight at the heart of Fallon’s pitch to MORE TH>N – that the ultimate purpose of insurance is to restore normality after some kind of disruption to customers’ lives.  I like the look of the new Lloyds TSB insight, wrapped up in their new strapline “For the journey” – that our lives consist of a whole series of overlapping journeys, some long and complicated, others short and simple, and we look to our financial services provider to help make them a bit easier and to help make us a bit more likely to reach our destinations.  And of course I hugely admire the whole range of insights in Nationwide’s Mark Benton campaign about how we perceive other High Street financial services providers.

But of these, and a few others with surprisingly insightful insights, only one – Nationwide – has been able to come up with a creative execution even half as good as the strategy. 

Obviously I’m biased because we lost the business, but I’m quite certain that MORE TH>N’s quiet, sad little commercials were a complete and utter waste of money.  They would quite literally have done better to burn the budget in their central heating boiler:  at least it would have delivered a few minutes of useful warmth.  The new Lloyds TSB campaign isn’t in that league, but, given the clarity and focus of the strategy (which, I strongly suspect, probably included the strapline or something very close to it), I’d have thought the creative team at Rainey Kelly might have come up with something a bit better than a bunch of animated characters on a train.

For many years, when we’ve teased agency creatives about the bland and generic nature of most financial advertising, they’ve responded by blaming the briefs.  Bland and generic brief = bland and generic creative, they’ve told us. Now, the briefs are getting better quite rapidly, but the creative work is generally making much slower progress.  Sharp and insightful brief = bland and generic creative?  Surely that’s not really very satifactory.

Ever since France’s mid-19th Century chattering classes poured scorn on the early exhibitions of the Impressionists, fellow-chatterers have been very dodgy about scorn-pouring when confronted with something new and different.

Sometimes, we’re painfully reminded why we’re wise to hold back.  I was grumpy when Artemis launched their “profit hunter” campaign a couple of years ago, mainly because we’d taken part in the same pitch and lost, and I wrote a piece for a trade paper which didn’t exactly pour scorn, but certainly raised a distinctly unimpressed eyebrow.  Two years on, I have to say the campaign has been a success – and, in particular, what seemed very odd and silly and out-of-category at the time now looks like a pretty successful and increasingly mainstream way for an investment advertiser to promote its funds.

Now, though, we face that Paris Salon moment again.  The same agency that does Artemis has launched its new campaign for Resolution Asset Management, again using illustration and again using an extended analogy to dramatise the role of the fund managers.  But this time, instead of representing them metaphorically as posh members of the 1930s hunting, shooting and fishing set, like Artemis, they’ve gone up a notch or two.  The new campaign represents them as Marvel-comic style superheroes.

I have to say that the scorn-pouring instinct is extremely strong.  “You’ve got to be kidding!!”, I want to say.  “Is there no height of vanity and self-importance to which these fund managers won’t go?  How about a campaign that treats them as Greek gods, poncing about on Mount Olympus?  Or as saints?  Maybe the guy running the India fund could be Mother Theresa.  Or as rock legends?  No, hang on a minute, that’s been done, the multi-manager team at F&C have already represented themselves as the Beatles.  No, when I come to think about it, I don’t think there is any height of vanity and self-importance to which fund managers won’t go.”

I must admit, the scorn-pourer and balloon-pricker in me really wants to put forward an investment funds campaign in which the fund managers are represented in an extended analogy as school dinner ladies or care-home workers.  But I fear that probably explains why the Superheroes agency – happily taking the odd litre or two of scorn in its stride – is doing so much better in the funds market than we are just now.

Actually, to do with how you win new business.  Anyone who’s read Christopher Booker on the subject (link to a good review: http://www.powells.com/review/2005_02_06.html) knows that there are only seven plots in storytelling (actually, I think that some years later he revised the number upwards to nine). 

In a moment of revelation, nowhere near Damascus but not too far, I guess, from the Syrian fish and chip shop in Camden, I suddenly realise that there’s a roughly similar number of strategies available to present in new business pitches - and that the secret of success lies in figuring out which one is most appropriate in each case.

Why is this discovery important?  Well, mainly because it’s how you win.  But also – maybe it’s the same point in different words – because it stops you wasting time worrying about stuff that makes you more likely to lose.

Most of all, it stops you wasting time on worrying about being original.  There may be one pitch in ten where this matters. The other nine, it’s a non-issue.

Let me give you an example, from the retail funds market.  A few years ago, in the depths of the 2002 crash, we won a pitch for the ISIS account.  Market conditions were so bad that this probably was the one time in ten when you had to do something different.  We did a very cards-on-the-table, tell-it-like-it-is, no-more-bull-market-hype thing built around the strapline “ThIS IS reality” (note how ISIS’s name is cleverly hidden in the line…)

The launch poster had a sceptical consumer saying “Overpromising and underdelivering – isn’t that what investments are all about?”, which was the kind of thought that didn’t just capture the zeitgeist but banged it up in solitary confinement, put it on a diet of bread and water and threw away the key.

Excellent.  But.

A few years later – for reasons that, with considerable understatement, I think we can say reflect more negatively on the client than on the agency – we found ourselves repitching for the account.  There had been a merger, and the brand was now F&C, not ISIS.  The markets were more bullish.  It was time for a more positive message.

We built a campaign around another cracking strapline – “Expect Great Things.”  We lost.  They liked the line – I can tell they did because to this day, F&C ads display a disconnected and irrelevant travesty of this line, “Expect Excellence”, bunged in pointlessly down at the bottom among the health warnings.  But this time, they didn’t want an original idea.  In fact, they bought an idea with the brand F&C cleverly hidden in the word “F&CT”.  This is a good idea – so good, in fact, that we’d very happily used it five years earlier in our work for Alex Lawrie Factors.

See what I mean about originality?  But we’re only half way there.  The big investment pitch of 2006 was M&G, and I must say I can hardly think of a brand I’d rather work for.  We lost.  This week, we see the winning agency’s new advertising.  Strapline:  “No promises.  Just great expectations.”  First ad’s headline:  “Surely it’s better to overdeliver than overpromise?”  The headline from our first ISIS poster, with the strapline from our F&C pitch.

For the avoidance of doubt, I want to make it absolutely clear that I’m not making any suggestion at all of any plagiarism here (except that stupid “Expect Excellence” strapline, which was certainly a rewrite of “Expect Great Things”).  Nor am I saying that any of the clients in my story made the “wrong” choice, either of strategy, of creative or indeed of agency.

What I am saying is that on two of the three occasions, we tried far too hard and worried far too much about doing something different and original, when in fact the real skill was to recognise which existing (unoriginal) strategy and idea fitted the situation best.

This task, obviously, isn’t completely straightforward.  Even when you’ve worked out what the seven strategies are (or is it nine?) you still start with an 84% chance (or 89% chance) of getting it wrong. A number of skills are required – in particular listening skills, so often agency people’s achilles ear – to whittle down those odds.

Still, I’m sure I’m right about this.  Now all I need is your help to pin down the seven (or nine) approaches.