Dare to be dull: PNC wants to break through with ‘brilliantly boring’ claim

A version of this article first appeared in the October BAI Executive Report: Anticipating banking’s 2025 marketing trends. Check out more of the issue for insight on data-driven budget asks, agency relationships, direct mail strategies and an AI boost for customer loyalty.

In a vibrant, fast-paced TV commercial featuring actor Chris Diamantopoulos, PNC Bank declares itself “Brilliantly Boring Since 1865.”

The alliterative, counterintuitive pairing of the words “brilliantly” and “boring” in the super-regional bank’s tagline is clever and puts a twist on conventional thinking in financial services, says Mark Gibson, who’s been chief marketing officer of three financial services organizations, when asked about the PNC ads that launched earlier this year.

“This campaign is a little bit risky,” says Gibson, who’s now senior consulting associate for Capital Performance Group, a financial services management consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. “In the sense that boring is usually viewed as a negative attribute, PNC is trying to turn it into a positive attribute.”

“I understand the rationale because as a customer, you want your money to be there when you need it,” Gibson adds. “Maybe they got a little overly clever, but I think the strategy was right, and they have accomplished their objective of differentiation. Subliminally, the message is: ‘Wow, PNC has been around for a long time, which leads to: They’re probably going to be around a long time in the future, which means your money probably safe.’”

Of course, campaigns of this magnitude are months, even years, in the making, but the messaging hit while the banking public harbored still fresh memories of 2023’s high-profile failures. That year, three regional lenders went under, led by a run on Silicon Valley Bank when the venture capital and startup market that the enterprise counted among its leading customers softened, prompting major withdrawals and spooking other depositors. New York’s Signature Bank and San Francisco-based First Republic Bank soon suffered similar fates.

The commercial-banking space had its own worries, though more contained, soon after in 2024, when exposure to a vulnerable U.S. commercial real estate (CRE) market triggered a series of credit downgrades for New York Community Bancorp and stirred rumblings for souring sentiment through financial services markets.

Other bankers perhaps didn’t go so far as to rebrand themselves as desirably “boring”, but they too are leaning on the term. On an April earnings conference call, Fifth Third Bancorp CEO Tim Spence sounded pleased to call his company’s quarterly results “boring” and Bloomberg News in tracking trending language from a host of public earnings calls logged a rise in this characterization used this year. It was a particularly noticeable change since 2022, the year before the SVB fallout.

Martha Bartlett Piland, president of Banktastic, a Topeka, Kansas, marketing agency for financial services organizations, likes PNC’s “Brilliantly Boring” campaign.

“It was a really good way to say, ‘trust us’ without actually saying ‘trust us,’” Bartlett Piland says. “Sometimes when banks or other companies talk about trust in their tagline, people wonder, ‘Why are you telling me that I should trust you?’”

In other words, is there a worrisome reason to remind the audience of this virtue?

Banks and credit unions, she says, frequently describe their strength and trustworthiness in their marketing messages. “But that is less memorable than ‘Brilliantly Boring. I thought it was clever, but also smart.”

Does it connect with everyone?

But as banks face increased competition from neobanks and nonbank competitors and as they work to position themselves ready to be an institution of choice for the customers on the receiving end of a record wealth transfer just starting to flow down from Baby Boomers, any message may have to be more than just one of reliability.

Gibson’s colleague Ally Akins, a Capital Performance consultant, points to an additional risk of the PNC ad campaign amid the financial services industry’s sizable investment in digital technology.

“We don’t like the idea that banking is boring. We don’t think that really resonates with customers,” Akins says. “Banking is becoming anything but boring with automated customer service agents, the gamification of savings and investment widgets. There is a lot that is changing.”

In general, Gibson says banks and credit unions struggle to set their business strategies and marketing messages apart in a largely commoditized, highly regulated industry. One of the most important goals of an advertising campaign is to find a lane and differentiate an organization’s products and services from the competition.

“From that perspective,” Gibson says, “I respect the PNC ad because it is very different than what you see out there. It is memorable and there is some humor.”

Methodical and rigorous attention to detail

Robert Passikoff, founder and president of Brand Keys, a New York City-based brand and research consultancy, says banks are challenged to differentiate their brands.

Passikoff, who was the vice president of research for Citicorp earlier in his career, says, “The acid test becomes: What’s the difference between the banks? And the answer is pretty much nothing. You can change the signs on the front of the banks, but it’s all the same.”

Banking relationships for customers are usually quite safe and routine. Trust is a given. Banking is just a basic part of life, he says.

“I give a lot of credit to PNC’s agency [Arnold Worldwide] because they essentially said in the ad: ‘We’re a bank. Yes, it’s boring, but we have done it brilliantly.  And that gives them some bragging rights.”

Pittsburgh-based PNC did not respond to an interview request, but in an interview on Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief July 3 podcast, PNC Chief Marketing Officer Jenn Garbach said the bank wanted to tell its story in a “powerful, breakthrough way.”

“We are not calling ourselves boring … We are embracing the philosophy of boring and how it enables brilliant outcomes,” she said on the podcast. Garbach also noted that the philosophy of “boring” entails methodical and rigorous attention to detail to produce positive outcomes for customers.

The campaign, she said, aims to strike a balance between a bank that can claim a nearly 160-year heritage of weathering the economic cycles and changes for the benefit of their customers and a bank that remains on the cutting edge. “There can be that perception that a bank that has been around for 160 years is maybe stodgy or set in its ways and not as nimble, agile or dynamic … It’s finding that balance.”

The campaign’s elements include TV, print, social, online video, audio, branch merchandise and sponsorships.

Capital Performance’s Gibson says whatever a bank’s strategy and message, they need to be distinctive and consistent over time to build a strong brand. “The strength of the brand really does matter, and there is the inherent belief that the better known the brand, the bigger it is, the stronger it is, then the safer it is.”

A strong brand, he says, is valuable in a time of crisis. “You are going to perform better than your less well-known peers. And you can do it no matter your size.”

Edmund Lawler is a contributing writer for BAI.