Everyone’s a number in Meridian Bank’s stylish, dystopian spot

Like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, the folks in Meridian Bank’s visually impressive new ad are reduced to numbers—account numbers in their case, in a dystopian world where people’s names have completely gone by the wayside.

It’s a modern capitalist problem across the board, and agency Elemental and director Dan French take it to hyperbolic extremes with wonderful production design across a number of deadpan vignettes, where the gloom of depersonalization has settled on the characters like a fog.

It’s a metaphor, of course, for Meridian’s competitors, who treat you like a number. At the end, the spot’s protagonist is led through a mysterious set of doors to a new world of Meridian comfort and respect.

Also read: Coinbase says young people’s gloomy future is fixable in stark ads

The world is so fully realized that it feels like a big-budget spot. In fact, the production was pretty lean, French told Ad Age.

“We had to be as smart as possible with the art and camera department,” he said. “It took a lot of war room meetings where we even decided which desks didn’t need monitors or keyboards to knock down some costs. If a prop wasn’t essential for a wide shot, we cut it.” 

The details are fantastic, from the number-shaped text on the flying pages in the office (production designer Nerijus Narmontas used an algorithm to generate the text from 1’s and 0’s) to the optometrist’s logo, also cleverly made from 1’s and 0’s.

“In the optometrist’s office I wanted everyone to look up right on queue, or in the line at the coffee shop to turn at the right moment,” said French. “That shot actually required a little bit of post trickery—comping a few different takes together on the static wide shot to get the perfect movement from everyone. It was really all about the details and we were all obsessed, even if some things never even got noticed, like the eye chart in the optometrist’s office, which had the letters replaced with numbers.”

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