FNB unfazed by leg-pull

Absa put out the bait, but First National Bank didn't take it.

Jupiter Drawing Room's Tom Cullinan was the creative in charge of the advert.

A girl pulls her tooth, seals it in an envelope and puts it under her pillow, visibly excited to receive some sort of reward. She wakes up the next morning with a little note telling her that she now has a certain number of ePoints. The look on her face tells you she wanted cash.

"What's the point of points?" goes the Absa Rewards tagline, taking a swipe at FNB's eBucks.

In a second advert, the girl does exactly the same, but instead of ePoints, she gets a power tool.

Again a swipe at FNB, which offers all sorts of products in its eBucks Store.

Absa gives you cash back is the message Cullinan gets across.

But why didn't FNB come back with something sassy?

"For two big organisations to go at it, tit for tat, in an advertising battle would be a waste of resources," said Carlos Simoes, marketing executive for eBucks.

The bank uses in-house creatives for its eBucks campaigns.

Instead, FNB went for a campaign to highlight all the eBucks that go unspent, which have piled up. Since the rewards programme's inception, R700-million has gone unclaimed.

Cullinan expected FNB to come out guns blazing. "Instead, we got a complimentary e-mail, that said we were good sports."

The e-mail was sent to the client. When Cullinan heard about it, he thought it was "a dummy" and that FNB and eBucks were planning to launch a direct comeback within weeks.

Something like the 1990s "beat the bends" jabs between BMW and Mercedes.

"But nothing came," he said.