If you happened to look at last Tuesday’s Daily Nation (Dec 5th), then you saw the BIG ad. You innocently flipped through Smart Company (undoubtedly the Daily Nation’s advertising Cash Cow), and got baffled somewhere at the middle when your eyes (by then accustomed to small black newsprint) were met by a humongous “20″ on Page 10, placed next to an equally gigantic “00″ on Page 11. You then turned the page to see another “00″ on Page 12 and then “0/-” on Page 13. You then eagerly turned to Page 14 to see where it would all lead to, and there you found the glorious reveal. “The biggest unsecured personal loans EVER”.

The folk at Barclays have obviously pulled off an advertising first to hype up their 2,000,000 bob (geddit?) unsecured loan. They have used not one, not two, but FIVE full pages of precious newspaper space to tell of a product of no less magnitude. This, my good friends, is the way to get mass attention: reach out from your medium, grab your audience by the neck and shake ‘em into noticing you – kindly by force, so to speak.

We were absolutely impressed, simply because of Barclays’ commitment to get the message across and do it in an unconventional way, using a conventional medium. Oh, and just so you know how much it might have cost, each full page must have set them back about 340,800 bob. Multiply that by 5 and you come to the humble sum of Kshs.1,704,000 spent in one sitting. Spent. Not wasted. Or blown. Or squandered.

We waited for some other material. An equally attention-grabbing radio spot? An eyeball-wrenching TV Commercial maybe? We’ve seen nothing yet.

Still, we wait patiently.