Mortgage Ads - and Property Porn | ...Gasp!

Mortgage Ads

and Property Porn

I thought I’d write about a super cool and exciting product for this week’s blog; mortgages…I’ll just let you calm yourself down…

Now I don’t understand mortgages at all, and my mother assures me that I’m not completely thick. It seems to me that most mortgage ads are a complete miasma of percentages and words I don’t know. The result is when one comes on telly, I instantly disengage and begin thinking about Daenerys Targaryen in a leotard. Again.

I like the concept of a parody horror movie trailer, particularly the line; “Inspired by made up events.” And it works well with the notion that “Buying your first home shouldn’t be scary”.


Also I really have no interest in educating myself in mortgages. This can be inhibiting because like you, I often encounter smug loudmouths in life. They exclusively want to talk London property and thus drop their trousers and wave their big mortgage around in the process. Well this is an area where I sadly don’t measure up, and not even Daenerys can help me.

Given my intransigence and lack of understanding, I was surprised to quite enjoy a mortgage ad today. It’s by Entrinsic, Toronto, for the Royal Bank of Canada; and here it is;

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I like it because it seems designed for the kind of people (like me) who won’t understand all the technical stuff, and are more likely to be influenced by an appeal to the emotions. The emotion in this ad is humour of course. It’s definitely my favourite emotion that (though I remain a fan of schadenfreude).

I like the concept of a parody horror movie trailer, particularly the line; “Inspired by made up events.” And it works well with the notion that “Buying your first home shouldn’t be scary”. I later found out that this is just one of a series which also parodies the tragic drama and romcom genres.

This made me curious to see if any other ads for this industry have been particularly well received. And it seems that mortgage company Ameriquest has been a leading light for some time. Here’s a compilation of their ads, using the slogan ‘Don’t Judge Too Quickly, We Won’t.’ All of which work extremely well. Like the RBC one, they have a simple message, communicated in an amusing and engaging way.

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What Rory Sutherland derides as ‘property porn’ in his book ‘The Wiki Man’ doesn’t excite me very much either. It’s probably why I have no interest in talking mortgages with the smug brigade at parties. The craze for property porn in this country has resulted in a dirge of media based on the dubious assumption that home improvement equals self-improvement. The crap mortgage ads out there always remind me of this great sketch from Mitchell and Webb, which takes the piss out the whole property porn movement.

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Well that was my blog about mortgage advertising, I hope you didn't get overexcited and injure yourself.

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