Your Business and Industry
Why movie posters? The meaning behind our new advert campaign
‘Why a movie poster campaign?’ you might ask.
Every mortgage tells a story. Whether that’s a family buying their forever home or a buy-to-let landlord using mortgage finance to grow an exciting business.
For all of these great stories, there’s a mortgage intermediary star, who is the action hero or the magician to make things happen.
We really wanted to capture the real-life impact that mortgage intermediaries have on their mortgage clients, especially for a specialist lender like us; the cases we see are ones which have not fitted high street criteria but a mortgage intermediary has opened a door for someone by presenting them with finance opportunity that they may not have been able to get otherwise.
The Solutions by Foundation advert was the first one to pop into existence. We are huge sci-fi fans and gamers here in the Foundation marketing department so the Solutions poster is a sci-fi ‘other world’ theme where the protagonist is in a futuristic space suit, setting out across a vivid purple scenescape of unusual properties. This is a character who is stepping boldly into a new world. The bright colour themes echo our new branding, and the theme of electricity echoes the developments in our technology and across the whole mortgage industry that are bringing borrowers closer to new opportunities. Like our new Solutions range, this movie poster is based in a newly discovered world which sits just outside of the normal buy-to-let with unusual blocks of buildings where adventure awaits.
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Perhaps the hero of this story is the mortgage intermediary leading their landlord client through their first Semi-commercial property or multi-unit freehold block. Or perhaps the client is one of life’s adventurers who have expatriated themselves abroad and need to mortgage a property here in the UK.
The new Residential by Foundation Dog advert is reminiscent of a heart-warming story about partnership – and the search for a family home.
Mortgage brokers will recognise the homeownership dreams their clients have in these movie posters; these are all the clients that have made their homeownership dream come true because a trusted mortgage intermediary has stepped in to get them on the mortgage finance they need.
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We used the dog image on this one partly because it resonates with our balloon dog which always scored highly from our previous marketing campaigns, but also importantly because dogs are part of the family home of so many types of clients. The blurred people in the background are again deliberately undefined - they could be friends, or a couple, or older and younger members of a wider family. This in itself is deliberately reflective of the Residential by Foundation mortgage range in which we accept the income of 4 people and we also accept deposits from wider than typical range of family members, as well as lending into retirement - so our age demographic is extremely wide.
The Buy to let by Foundation advert had a few iterations before we settled on a hero. we wanted to acknowledge that buy-to-let is increasingly a business proposition where landlords have to work extremely hard to make it a success - rarely getting recognition for the contribution they make to the PRS which is so critical to the housing situation in the UK.
We initially had a male protagonist as the hero in the story however we wanted to reflect that according to our NRLA data, over 40% of landlords are women. And this one means business! She’s pulling her jacket closed against the inhospitable climate and getting jobs done. Driving gloves particularly indicate that it’s a fast-moving industry, and this character has every intention of making a profit.
The goals for every advert campaign are to get noticed, make a connection and be memorable. And I think these are certainly a noticeable change of style compared to what can often be quite stoic rate-led or criteria-lead adverts in our industry.
There’s always a risk in doing something outside of the norm, but sometimes your business is making a change that deserves to be noticed, so your marketing must too.
We hope the adverts connect with our mortgage intermediaries who perhaps relate to some of the stories, or are simply mad movie fans like us. Let us know what you think.
FOR INTERMEDIARIES ONLY
