Baseline: Mutual fund crowd investing big, badly

February 5, 1996 by Strategy Staff

A year or two back, judging only by the sheer, devil-may-care, enormity of their advertising budgets, one figured that truly obscene wealth resided principally in the hands of (a) Calvin Klein (b) Wallace and Harrison McCain, (c) Canadian banks, and (d) the long-distance telephone mafia.

Well, some things just don’t change. But now that our feuding ‘tater farmers appear to have found ways to amuse themselves that aren’t predicated on amassing gross rating points just for the hell of it, their places in the Pantheon of Wretched Excess have been snapped up by those paragons of nouveau riche, the mutual fund crowd!

Now these guys are pulling in a billion and a quarter per month. Makes McDonald’s billion burgers look un peu mickey-mouse, non?

And like rubes everywhere whom God has chosen to anoint, suddenly, with great lashings of wealth, they afford us poor-but-worldly souls a few moments of harmless mirth in that they may spend big, but they spend exceedingly klutzy!

It takes a while in any field to get a handle on style, and with advertising being fundamentally a matter of style and fashion nuance, the neophyte always tries too damn hard, confuses form with content, takes it much too seriously, and afraid of being wrong, apes all the lowest forms of life.

Like the old gag about the bumpkin on his first date who compliments the lady with Golly Miss Gloria, you sure stink pretty tonight, a lot of mutual fund advertising comes close, but no cigar, if you get my drift.

Take Trimark. A full page in the Globe, and double truck in Saturday Night to show us a magnifying glass with the headline Most mutual fund companies look closely at their investments, and then a microscope with the annotation So do we. get it? get it? nudge-nudge? The old microscope metaphor! What a daring concept! We really look into the stuff we throw your dough at!

(Makes you recall all those classmates who went into finance deliberately to avoid life’s subtleties, gracenotes and imponderables!)

agf have hitched their wagon to veronika, a kind of From Russia With Love kgb-look-alike fund manager with the steely eyes of a remax lady and a bank manager’s smile. She shares her secrets of rrsp success with us. Secrets like look for new leaders, and beware of weak balance sheets. Stuff that wouldn’t dawn on the average investor.

Mackenzie takes a spread to introduce us to thirty-ish, blow-dried Wayne, an obvious composite of Average Canadian Guydom, with pudgy little eyes and a wispy moustache who says My RRSP causes fewer sleepless nights thanks to STAR. Now Wayne doesn’t look like a worrier, and you’d guess his last sleepless night was when he left his bowling ball at Pizza Hut, but you never know. STAR is an acronym for investment bafflegab that, to Wayne, spells fewer sleepless nights. Yeah.

He’s a clone of Dave in the Midland Walwyn fishing spot. Dave’s the genius who, at midlife, has just figured out he’s gotta get his money working for him! (Dave’s such a bozo he’s been doin’ it the other way around!) But life still has surprises in store for Dave, as when older, wiser Tom reminds him his money can’t think for him! This really floors Dave big time. Wow, you want heavy or what?

Altamira, historically pretty hip, ad-wise, gives us simpleminded cartoon animation allegories. A little man pumps up a balloon that looks like the globe (probably picked it up at a Unitel used globe balloon sale), another comes up one palm tree short to hang a hammock. The tra-la-la school of mutual fund flackery!

Scotia RRSP opts to scare the living shit out of us by noting that to make $40K a year at retirement you’ll need $1,275,535 in savings. Huh? They refer to this as a reality check! More like a suicide note, actually.

Spectrum United does a not-half-bad little spot set in London, where they ride a hot new-idea stock to a 50% gain in three months. They manage to include James Bond techno-toys, London cabs, Big Ben, Nelson’s Column and double-decker buses. To them, there are no foreign markets. Lucky them! We’re stuck with 80% Canadian content!

We have already dumped on the silly Dynamic rowing crew in this space, and the trapeze artists are no improvement.

Which leaves the collector’s item prize to a Fidelity Investments print piece which reads At night I lie awake and wonder: Twenty years from now when I have the time will I have the money? A face stares into your eyes from the page, worried, imploring, head tilted to one side like Ronald Reagan when asked by the press about Irangate, only….the face….is the face of a dog! This dog is worried worse than Wayne about the future. But, hey, there’s hope! Even with klutzy ads, a Rottweiler could make it big in mutual funds!

Barry Base is president and creative director of Barry Base & Partners in Toronto.