Can a cartoon automated teller machine with a punny name and a heavy Boston accent keep consumers from defecting from community banks to larger ones with bigger ATM networks?
The Massachusetts Bankers Association seems to think so. This month the trade group began airing television commercials featuring a walking, talking, streetwise ATM named Sum Buddy.
The spots are meant to promote Sum, a coalition of community banks and credit unions that do not charge one another's customers for ATM transactions. The network includes 495 financial institutions with over 2,900 ATMs; the Massachusetts trade group represents 330 of those institutions, which own 2,000 of the ATMs.
The promotion is the trade group's biggest advertising push to date on the coalition's behalf. The ads are airing in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.
"This is the first time we have raised the production values to this level," said Bruce E. Spitzer, the director of communications for the MBA, which founded the coalition nearly five years ago with the help of the NYCE division of First Data Corp. of Denver. NYCE runs it today.
The campaign "has the potential to break through and reach more consumers, because of the unique creative execution," Mr. Spitzer said. "Sum Buddy is designed to be attractive to audiences of all ages."
The tagline for the ads are, "SUM Saves U Money."
Sum was one of the first antisurcharge networks that community banks set up after Visa U.S.A. and MasterCard International dropped their bans six years ago on the practice of charging ATM usage fees to noncustomers.
The Massachusetts General Court was one of the bodies that attempted to pass an antisurcharge law. Mr. Spitzer said that the state's lawmakers viewed the development of Sum as "a free-market solution" that precluded the need for state-mandated price controls.
Haden Edwards, the senior creative officer and co-owner of the Manchester, Mass., advertising company Tracy Edwards Inc., said the Sum Buddy character first "came off my pencil about six months ago."
According to Mr. Edwards, the character speaks with an accent that is "north of Southie," referring to the working-class neighborhood of South Boston, where the aspiration of r's is rare.
"The character has a tremendous amount of legs, he works very well in television, and will work very well as a mascot," Mr. Edwards said. There is a strong possibility the character will also run in print ads.
The Sum coalition now includes financial institutions in 20 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. All of the ATMs in the network sport a yellow Sum decal.
The Sum Buddy character is owned by NYCE, but William Peirce, its director of networks services, said it does not plan to put together ads featuring either the character or the Sum coalition.
NYCE has developed the programs for their financial institutions for them "to optionally take advantage of," he said. "We're not making any comments on whether surcharges are good or bad. By the same token, in the case of Massachusetts, when someone wants to market NYCE services and transactions, we'll support it."
