With Spanish financial giant Santander’s rescue of the beleaguered, bankrupt British banks, I’ve watched with interest to see how they manage the change process as familiar high street brands like Abbey disappear forever.

One thing struck me on watching the Santander commercials, and I hope it’s unintended, is the pattern forming of children’s toys from my past. Lewis Hamilton, 2008 F1 world champion spearheads the brand. He’s been depicted as a plastic construction model (Airfix), racing his model car (Scalextric) in front of a plastic crowd, Airfix again. And in the latest unintelligible commercial, we see the construction of a bridge from red toy bricks (Lego – Danish for ‘let’s play’). So here’s my confident prediction for the future – Meccano, the model construction system set up by one Frank Hornby in 1908, will make an appearance very soon.

Are we seeing an unintended ‘mash-up’ between James May on the BBC and Santander’s advertising campaign? Probably not – it’s just that good old nostalgia is back in fashion.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 6:40 am and is filed under Advertising, Brands, Marketing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.