The Super Bowl ad for a mortgage facility called Rocket Mortgages discusses why buying a home should be easier. People’s minds went straight to the subprime mortgage crisis.
Quicken Loans’ Super Bowl spot for Rocket Mortgages aired in the first-half of the game. The Twitter response was rapid.
Are we really offering mortgages with almost no underwriting again? Was that the #RocketMortgage message? #SuperBowl
— Pat Kiernan (@patkiernan) February 8, 2016
The 60 second spot intended to reason that if more people were able to buy homes easily, there would be more people buying things to fill that home, which would generate more jobs for the craftsmen making them. The craftsmen could then buy their own homes, creating a perfect consumption cycle.
The ad led to the question, “Isn’t that the power of America itself…now shrunk to fit the hands of a child…?” And although the voiceover then added, “…or more helpfully a home-buying adult,”
What the ad actually said to people was, “fast, easy loans.” And that auto-connected them to memories of the sub-prime mortgages that triggered the financial crisis in 2008.
Quicken Loans tried to soften the pummelling on Twitter by stating that its mortgage practice follows all government guidelines. That was not universally applauded.
The only thing more predatory than #RocketMortgage lending is the aggressive PR team responding to every negative tweet
— Jo Kimbrell (@jokimbrell) February 8, 2016
Within the first minute after the spot aired, more than 14,000 people visited Quicken Loan’s website. 100 bankers were on call to answer questions. It would be fair to suppose that not all of them were loan enquiries.
Quicken Loans president and chief marketing officer, Jay Farner, is calling the ad a success nonetheless.
“The win was driving folks to the site,” he stated. “We agree with those comments that there needs to be transparency and that’s the exact thing we are trying to do. We are giving people visibility and understanding of the mortgage they qualify for.”
