The story I didn’t know needed to be told.
It’s about all of us and our banks feeling helpless to stop being scammed for hundreds of thousands of dollars online as scams become more and more sophisticated. This recent campaign was designed to just ask everyone to ‘take a breath’ before crossing a dangerous line.
How do you warn people about scams without sounding like every other warning they’ve already tuned out? In 2025, American consumers lost $15.9 billion to banking fraud. Bank fraud doesn’t look the way people expect it to. It looks like a phone call from a panicked family member, a romance that moved too fast, an online emergency that suddenly requires cash. CNB Bank came to us with a problem that felt almost impossible to solve: The answer was a television broadcast campaign built around quiet but brutally honest, supportive humor, delivered direct to the camera by a bank president who had never been on camera before.
To increase the impact, we looked for a massive space to make the bank president feel small and vulnerable – like how victims feel after it’s too late. The campaign was filmed in a massive, abandoned granite shed in rural New England. As bank tellers are generally on the front lines of the fraud After its perpetrated, we asked every teller to leave their stations for a few hours and join their president in solidarity. Every creative and production decision was made in service of waking up Americans, especially older Americans that yes this can happen to you.
CNB’s willingness to take a risk with the storytelling is exactly what made this work. If your institution is ready to say something that can make a difference, let’s talk.
Every great commercial is like a good joke; everything is driving to the last line. The punch line. To deliver the story that might make a difference, my first thought was this can’t be a just ‘spokesperson’ for the bank. it must be the Boss. Kathy Austin, CNB President, had never been on television, never taken part in the banks broadcast campaigns. Rather than the usual heavy handed dark ‘just be safe’ message, I wanted to keep it light, so the audience might stay around for the power of the message in the closing line.
The bank assembled forty-four tellers for a companywide call. “I’ve known ‘Jim’ and his wife for 20 years. Last year his wife passed away. He seemed so alone. Last week he came in to withdraw $8,000. He said he needed it for some ‘emergency car repairs’. This week it was $20,000. ‘I asked in a cheery voice “exciting new project Jim?” He glared at me ‘It’s my money I can do what I want with it.’ Jim was approaching $100,000 when I asked my manager to intervene. Jim quickly broke down, saying he had ‘met a woman’ online. “She seemed so great. She listened. It moved so fast, we decided to her move in together. She just had one problem – a mortgage on her house, so I decided for love – I could fix that. Not more than a minute after I sent her all the money, I had a terrible feeling. Sure enough, her number stopped working. I never heard from her again. I sat for two hours with these front line hero’s sharing similar ‘elder abuse’ horror stories.
Once the bank president agreed to our idea, we needed a place to film the campaign. I wanted it to feel big – and her small. I wanted her to feel all alone, like her customers in their homes. I asked her to talk right into the camera. To reach into Americans homes as they watched the evening news. In their living rooms and their kitchens, often scared and lonely.
Six am, truck loaded we prepared to head out. Flat tire. Repack into crew vehicles….to the middle of nowhere a retired ‘Granite shed’ where massive granite slabs used to be cut into usable forms and moved with the largest overhead crane in the state. We assembled a lot of crew and gear to film one person. Kathy was not a trained actor. She had studied her lines and was a seriously great trooper for doing this take after take till we got it right We also brought every teller, and manager available to deliver one final line. “We’ve got your back…. we’ve ALL got your back.”
Seven months later, out of 13,000 entries ‘Take a Breath’ won a 2024 national Telly Award. We won for a television campaign I had the highest hopes for – but didn’t turn out as good as I hoped. We won because of the courage of a client who felt so strongly about their customers being bilked out hundreds of thousands of dollars – they had had enough. A small town, billion dollar bank whose customers are made up of thousands and thousands of people, mainly from small towns. Many elderly. Many alone.
Kathy Austin also recently went on to be ‘VBA Woman of the Year’.
Watch the original commercial.
