OPINION: Cowen on ... Barclays.(Brief Article)

Barclays' marketing director, Simon Gulliford, was fairly free with his opinions last week, decrying the 'dumbing-down' of UK advertisers and, in particular, the 'fluff and candy stuff' peddled by its rival Lloyds TSB. By contrast, he announced, Barclays' new campaign through Bartle Bogle Hegarty would be thought-provoking and credit the advertising-literate audience with the intelligence that it deserved.

Could it be that Gulliford is hyping the campaign in these terms because he feels the need to justify the controversial account switch between Leagas Delaney and BBH? It seems more than possible, because the first thing that springs to mind when you see the new Barclays ads isn't their groundbreaking intelligence, but their resemblance to the 'big' campaign that preceded them.

The word, which caused Barclays so much trouble when it decided to greet the campaign's launch with the closure of 170 branches in a day last year, has been dropped and replaced with the strapline: 'fluent in finance.' But the essential ingredients remain the same - charismatic star delivers a crisp, dramatic monologue about something vaguely related to banking.

In fact, the casting of Samuel L Jackson intensifies some of the problems that faced the Leagas Delaney campaign. There is no natural connection between a massive American movie star and a UK high-street bank. In fact, there's no earthly reason why Jackson should have any knowledge of Barclays at all. Tim Roth and Anthony Hopkins are big movie stars but at least they are British - at least it was possible they could have banked there at some point in their lives. Not Sam. He comes from a different world completely. He feels like a hired gun.

This isn't helped by Jackson's natural screen persona. This is a man who's made his name playing gangsters, instantly associated with the scary guy from Pulp Fiction who recites Ezekiel 25:17 before blowing his victims away. It feels as if ...