Advantage Direct

Remember Terry Donovan? No? Surely, you remember Jason Donovan? Perhaps some younger customer owned banking staff don’t know either but Jason was a huge star of TV, film and music and his father Terry was a significant Australian actor, now in his 80s.

It is a measure of the reach of mutuals that in the 1990s a star as large as Terry Donovan was used in a promotional film. This four-and-a-half-minute promotional video titled Advantage Direct was produced by Advantage Credit Union in 1998. It shows Terry Donovan revealing the level of technologically based customer service provided by Advantage (under the Advantage Direct promotional banner) at the time.

Terry walks viewers through Advantage’s phone-based customer service, including loan applications as well as everyday phone banking. There is a guide to Advantage’s internet banking procedures but Terry says, “You may prefer to use Advantage’s never busy fax number”, before we get a short demonstration of how to fax a document through to Advantage.

One take away from the video might be that aside from the fax, online banking services haven’t changed as much as we sometimes think since the late 20^th century? Perhaps the biggest change is in internet-based marketing?