“Sometimes we prosper most when we help others. We respect that. And at Santander Bank, respect adds up.” This is the idea behind one of the latest Santander commercials, which brings back Piggy, the bank’s cute mascot.
The spot, created by agency Arnold Worldwide, features a woman who is followed by the animated piggy bank during her jogging sessions, part of her training for a marathon. When she wants to sleep more in the morning, Piggy pulls the covers off her to motivate her to go running and accompanies her every day, regardless of the weather. Thus, viewers get to see the cute piggy bank running, as well, through the rain, the snow, and on the beach, during the summer days. This is how the woman collects donations for NEMC Children’s Hospital, where Piggy goes, after he and his owner cross the finish line at the marathon. When it enters the hospital, the piggy bank multiplies as a metaphor for spreading the donation.
Serving as soundtrack is a cover of Matthew Wilder’s “Break My Stride”.
For this commercial, Piggy was redesigned from scratch to allow for its extended mobility, according to Chris Redding, VFX/2D supervisor at Framestore, who worked on bringing the porcine hero to life. “Arnold really wanted to create a new character design that was different from but reminiscent of the piggy bank from the first commercial.
The logic was that every person has their own version of Piggy, in the same way everyone would have a different dog,” Redding said, revealing that they used a rigid stand-in model for the first Piggy commercial and that this time they used puppets to have a way of capturing great on-set reference.
