You can see strange things if you venture north of the Wall: wildlings, mammoth-wrangling giants, maybe even a White Walker. Now there’s a new addition to that list: a Bank of Scotland TV campaign with the iron clackers to brazenly invoke Game of Thrones.
Since their 2008 flameout, banks have tended to focus on real people in their ads to try and seem “relatable”. But, it turns out, a little flight of fantasy can be a breath of fresh air. In the ad, a timid young man is under siege, bombarded by house-buying advice from his know-it-all parents. In a break from reality possibly caused by stress, he’s whisked to a symbolic crossroads in a wintry landscape that’s definitely, absolutely not Westeros.
There, big laddie James Cosmo – also familiar as Castle Black legbreaker-in-chief Jeor Mormont – delivers a motivational ramble in what looks like his plumed Night’s Watch costume. The Old Bear implies that, for the straight dope when it comes to financial matters, one should get thyself down to a Bank of Scotland branch pronto. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the general gist, and by throwing in some blather about owls to explain away the feathery cosplay, it seems to tiptoe on the right side of legal actionability – if there were any references to Lannisters paying their debts in the first draft, they’ve been excised in the final product.
A canny attempt to slipstream the cultural saturation of HBO’s torrid megasoap then, and let’s face it: Game Of Thrones is really all about old-fashioned feudal barons rewriting laws as they please to ruthlessly amass the greatest war chest. Bankers must absolutely love it.
