Capital One's carpet bombing

Capital One's 'What's in your wallet?' ads filling airwaves USA today reports: "If you think you're seeing Capital One ads all the time, you are. Capital One spent $5.4 million on ads in January, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus. That's more than rival Visa and MasterCard. Capital One spent $285 million in 2004, more than American Express and not far behind Visa and MasterCard."


Capital One - Huns - long (2004) 0:60 (USA)

saddest quote in the article :

"We have one of the best ad campaigns on TV and one of the strongest ad campaigns in financial services," Girardo says.
But that didn't save the ad agency. One of the lowest moments for an agency is when it creates successful ads and still gets fired. That's what happened with McCann-Erickson, New York.

Hat tip to Claymore!

The Spade ads mentioned in the USA Today article are here:


Capital One - David Spade - No - 1 (2004) 0:30 (USA)


Capital One - David Spade - No - 2 (2004) 0:30 (USA)

More huns!

Capital One - Huns (2004) 0:30 (USA)

Adland® is supported by your donations alone. You can help us out by buying us a Ko-Fi coffee.
Anonymous Adgrunt's picture
comment_node_story
Files must be less than 1 MB.
Allowed file types: jpg jpeg gif png wav avi mpeg mpg mov rm flv wmv 3gp mp4 m4v.
ernieschenck's picture

Successful the Capital One campaign mighbt have been, but creatively I personally never thought much of it. The David Spade stuff, maybe. But the Huns? Not cool.,

Neaner's picture

I never understood the huns ones to be honest. Makes no sense.

AnonymousCoward's picture

I don't completely understand the quote. The original CapOne "What's In Your Wallet" campaign was created by DMB&B. Lee Garfinkel was the ECD. Then Publicis disolved the agency and Garfinkel went into hiatus for a while. In the mean time, the client put the account in review. During the review, Kaplan Thaler Group, another Publicis agency, ran the account, doing work that was not nearly as compelling as the original campaign. Then McCann Erickson won the review and had the account for about a year. None of their work had the cinematic scope, or sophistication, of the original DMB&B work. Meanwhile, Garfinkel became ECD of DDB New York. The Heinekin account, which has followed him from agency to agency, landed at DDB. An now so has CapOne.

So, depending on how you look at it, you could say that the person behind the original work has been vindicated. Or you can take credit for someone else's work and whine to the trades when the client gives credit where credit is due.