This Ad Campaign Won’t Be The Thing To Save Them Now… But It Might Help You

If you are a CIT employee, exec, customer or lender (am i forgetting anybody? oh yes, investors, though they saw a 70!! percent bump Friday) these cannot be easy days. The 101-year old lender to small businesses might file for bankruptcy on Monday. If that happens, it’ll be the fifth largest such filing in US history, per the Wall Street Journal.

Given my job I probably should remember a lot more ad campaigns than I do. The fact is I don’t remember very many at all. But I do remember one from CIT. I would actually look forward! to seeing the ads in the New Yorker — even the repeats. It was a really nice example of engaging, interesting, informative advertising — “content”  or stories really.  It wasn’t earth-shattering…  in fact it was a pretty basic idea of profiling customers. Somehow they did a good job choosing a mix of customers to profile. They were good storytellers. And they really dug into it with them. The straight-up print ads (which unfortunately I can’t get a hold of to show you here) were particularly engaging.

Here is where the campaign lived online: Check it out while you can here.

There are probably many lessons to learn about what CIT did wrong… but this one is something they did right.

Please Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit Stumble