andrewbevan:

Above, BBDO NY’s latest ad for FedEx, “Enchanted Forest”.

Adding a personality to a brand as boring as a logistics company is no easy feat, but BBDO have made the brand both friendly, fun and personable. Its ads like these that should inspire the UK’s Post Office to seriously overview their advertising.

The Post Office’s advertisements go down a “your local Post Office” route, by even adding the tagline “the people’s Post Office” to their TVCs, yet the reality is that they are becoming more corporate by the day. If you enter a Post Office nowadays, you aren’t greeted by your local sub-postmaster, you’re greeted by an usher. This usher then herds you to the designated till where they attempt add-on sales until their eyes pop out.

This lack of personability isn’t helped by the fact that the Post Office are constantly closing down smaller, local branches in favour of City Centre “Crown” Post Offices. I’m not saying that it is wrong to become more corporate, but their communications are ignoring what the public is seeing, constant headlines relating to local Post Office closures.

The Post Office needs to embrace their development into a more corporate brand if they are to see it work, rather than still pretend that they are still the same local post office from the 1960’s.