Media: Remembering Glendale Federal

TORONTO, ONTARIO - In this era of financial bailouts, the banking atmosphere in the mid-to-late 1990's is hard to imagine. At the time, bank mergers were rapidly decreasing the quality of services available to bank customers. One of my all-time favorite political cartoons was published in that era showing a bank with its sign saying "Current Time," "Current Temperature," and "Current Name." Where I was living in California, the Bank of America and Wells Fargo were viewed most negatively in the public zeitgeist. Personally, I was becoming frustrated with the Union Bank of California, the result of a merger with the previously-satisfactory Bank of California.

Into that charged atmosphere entered two highly effectively advertising campaigns. American Savings Bank--which ironically had just been purchased by Washington Mutual and would eventually be changed over to the "WaMu" name--adopted its parent's "Do the Math" series of ads for its free checking accounts. These ads did a variety of gimmicks to point out that no matter how many times zero is added or multiplied, the result is still zero.

The most memorable campaign, though, came from Glendale Federal Bank. Written and voiced by southern California personality April Winchell, it featured a customer of a newly-merged mega-bank describing her travails in trying to keep using her account.

A typical gag went something like this: "I logged on to www.takeallmymoney.com but the page just didn't load, and then this message popped up saying 'unable to connect with URL' [pronounced 'Earl']. I don't know who URL is, but I hope he's not a teller or it will cost me five bucks." In another spot, Winchell re-wrote "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" into "Where Have All the Branches Gone?" with lyrics like, "Where have all the branches gone? They are all closed now... everyone who knew my name, they got the ax... now I'm paying higher fees, no one even talks to me... when will I ever learn?"

My all-time favorite of the Glendale Federal ads was one in which Winchell described calling her bank to try to find out if the bank had found a lost item she left at a branch. After being on hold for an hour, the person on the other end of the line was actually at some other location [this was in the days before foreign outsourcing; today she'd be in India] and stated that she couldn't give out the branch's direct phone number. The punch line, "Well, can you give me the number for Amnesty International instead? You're torturing me." I've been ready to use that line every time I've called a bank and been put on hold since.

Unfortunately, the ads seem to be unavailable on the Internet, though Winchell herself tells an interesting story related to the ads on her blog.

More than a decade later, Glendale Federal is long gone, now a part of Citigroup. Where I escaped from fees, Washington Mutual, failed during the financial crisis of 2008 and its assets have been purchased by Chase. In the end, there's almost no avoiding what April Winchell would call the www.reallybigbank.com phenomenon, and now we don't even have the ads to console us like we did in the 1990's.