The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Corp. (HSBC) bills itself as "the world's local bank". But as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message, and the message I'm getting from HSBC's current TV commercials is that the bank is, as it always was, quite quite British.
HSBC's latest scheme (in the best British sense of the world) is a plan to help young people -- apparently young Asians, to judge from the commercial -- save for their futures. The plan is called the "Advance" plan. Nothing wrong with the concept, and print ads don't annoy me at all. But the TV ads are something else.
The TV spots are produced in Old Blighty [that's England, if you've never heard the soubriquet. Ed.] by a British ad agency, whose brief must have been to make one size fit all. Why do I say that? Because the voice-over for the pictures of the young Oriental girl happily planning her future is done by an English woman...I should say an English lady...with a Mayfair accent that's even posher than that of Her Britannic Majesty.
She -- the person doing the voice-over -- pronounces "advance" as "advawnce", to rhyme with "dawnce" as a London ballet critic would say it. The accent grates on the North American ear, which is what I have two of. I'll stick to my local local bank, thenk yew very much.
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