Clearly this advert is absolutely fucking appalling (slappable faces, ironic dancing and miming to music, awful concept), but what’s most egregious about Halifax’s ‘we give you a fiver from time to time’ boast is that this will be clawed back by Halifax’s recently introduced overdraft charges that amount to £1 or £2 per day for using an overdraft facility.
That’s quite a lot of cash for anyone who uses their overdraft facility. In fact it’s either £365 a year or £730 a year depending on how big your facility is. If you have the misfortune of being overdrawn without an arranged overdraft it’s nearly two grand over a year. That fiver doesn’t look quite so enticing now does it?
Of course, as we all know, all banks are absolute bastards who will screw you every which way, so HBOS is no different from any other bank in that regard.
What I would like to see, though, is the government forcing banks they have a significant stake in (a 43 per cent stake in Lloyds, which owns HBOS, which is essentially Halifax) to make a series of adverts in their current style where they cheerfully pronounce the various ways they’re trying to beast their customers.
It could go like this:
DJ: We’ve got a caller on Line One!
CALLER: Why are you trying to bum me over overdraft fees?
DJ: Haha! Because we’ve got a carte blanche to brutally hammer every single one of you! Can I just ask if you were conned into banking with us through this risible ‘fiver a month’ deal?
CALLER: Yeah, but with all these overdraft charges it’s a drop in the ocean!
DJ: Of course, that’s the whole point! And how else are we supposed to pay off all those toxic debts we accrued by backing these never-never sub-prime mortgages? By the way, thanks for the 17 billion!
And on that note, here’s The O’Jays, with For the Love of Money! Fuck you all!