MANCHESTER, N.H. – St. Mary’s Bank, the nation’s first credit union, will kick off a year-long celebration of its 100th birthday this Sunday with a new series of TV commercials on the ABC series: Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
The debut of the ads is scheduled to coincide with this week’s show, which features the destruction and rebuilding of a New Hampshire home. Representatives of the 99-year-old credit union will be handing out chocolate coins emblazoned with the St. Mary’s logo at the local Verizon Wireless Arena, where hundreds of Granite Staters are expected to gather to watch their neighbor’s house made over on national TV.
The ads will focus on the credit union’s new theme: The Place Where You Belong and the commercials will feature a new song which licenses the tune of the hit song “Up Where We Belong,” sung to the words, “This is the place where you belong.” The song was made famous as the theme to the movie, “An Officer and a Gentleman.”
“We’ve done TV before, but this is much bigger than anything we’ve done in the past,” Elizabeth Stodolski, head of marketing for the $650 million credit union, told The Credit Union Journal. “We’re not just celebrating 100 years, but really taking this opportunity to position this credit union for the future.”
Three TV commercials will run throughout the state of New Hampshire on TV station WMUR and local Comcast cable stations. On Monday, a similar campaign will launch on radio. Later, the TV and radio spots will be supplemented with print and Web pieces.
The TV commercials were designed by local ad firm Griffin, York and Krause and feature real New Hampshire people and real St. Mary’s members.
The campaign is scheduled to run through all of 2008 and into 2009.
St. Mary’s Bank opened in November 1908 and is believed to be the only credit union in the country with an open charter.
