{"id":73514,"date":"2009-12-09T17:56:37","date_gmt":"2009-12-09T22:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/infosthetics.com\/archives\/2009\/12\/banking_versus_banana_smoothies_an_infographic_movie_controversy.html"},"modified":"2009-12-09T17:56:37","modified_gmt":"2009-12-09T22:56:37","slug":"banking-versus-banana-smoothies-an-infographic-movie-controversy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/73514","title":{"rendered":"Banking versus Banana Smoothies: An Infographic Movie Controversy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"westpac_banana_smoothies.jpg\"
\nAs an avid infosthetics reader, you should be well accustomed with the notion of infographically animated movies. Well, you might be surprised that the latest infographic movie in Australia has caused a storm of controversy<\/a>, which even motivated the country’s Prime Minister to step in and comment that the company in question should have ”a long hard look at itself<\/em>”. <\/p>\n

The background is not that complex. Westpac<\/a>, one of the only 4 large banks in Australia<\/a>, recently raised its variable mortgage rate<\/a> with 0.45 percentage points, nearly twice the level of the Reserve Bank’s 0.25 percentage points increase<\/a>, and significantly more<\/a> than its 3 other competitors. While this initiative was already enough to score some major headlines<\/a> in the national press<\/a>, the bank tried to smooth things over by sending hundreds of thousands of Westpac customers an email on Monday night from the bank’s retail chief explaining its supercharged interest rates. <\/p>\n

Included in the email was an infographically animated video titled “Cool Bananas”, justifying the bank’s decision to raise interest rates by comparing the business of banking with selling banana smoothies. Just as a storm hits and destroys a banana field, and increases the prices of banana smoothies, the banks were hit by a crisis of their own, increasing their cost of lending. For those outside Australia, the chosen theme subtly points to an Australian phenomenon in its recent past, namely the banana shortage<\/a> caused by Cyclone Harry in 2006, which increased banana prices across the country by 400-500%. <\/p>\n

Australian banana farmers, advertising executives (already embarrassed worldwide by the recent Vegemite “iSnack 2.0” rename debacle<\/a>), local politicians and bank customers somehow did not like the gesture. Their comments range from the utterly condescending tone of the movie, to the implied comparison between “an act of God” (the hurricane) and the (self-inflicted?) current banking crisis. <\/p>\n

Read some the press coverage here<\/a> and here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Watch the infographic video in question below<\/a>. (sorry for the bad quality, cannot seem to find better version)<\/p>\n

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\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As an avid infosthetics reader, you should be well accustomed with the notion of infographically animated movies. Well, you might be surprised that the latest infographic movie in Australia has caused a storm of controversy, which even motivated the country’s Prime Minister to step in and comment that the company in question should have ”a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}