Advertising: Ocean's wet fish is saved

It's the cheapest ad set-up in town. You fill a studio with second-hand desks and old VDUs going nowhere, plus lots of extras with headphone sets looking busy. And then you get a presenter with the Golden Age of TV (1972) style and looks – somewhere between Raymond Baxter and Hughie Green – to stroll into shot and pitch you some kind of obviously downmarket financial service: cut-price health insurance, ambulance-chasing accident compensators, loan consolidators. He takes it slowly, the graphics are simple and there's a lot of repetition: "That's fifty pounds, yes, fifty pounds, less than ... "

It's a favourite format for spoofing, not least in other clever-dick Channel 4 kinds of advertising. It's not "branding" and it's not art; it's selling and Oxbridge admen would rather not do too much of it. One thing about the hardest sells, of course, is that they're aimed at poor people – people who earn a fifth of the middling senior ad agency salary and a 20th of what the top bananas get.

Unusually, in the Ocean Finance commercial, which in every other respect comes straight off the belt for scripting, production values etc, we see a large and convincing cross-section of these people. They're satisfied customers and they seem entirely believable. The fact is you don't get many respectable/deserving poor types in TV advertising. You get thesps as lads, you get Buster Bloodvessel types, but you don't get ordinary poorish people any more than you ever get real toffs. It's really quite startling to see them.

"They made it so easy, in just one loan," says one woman with that tough-life look and deep-fried hair. "They didn't frighten me at all," says another, overweight woman who you can imagine doesn't go out very much. "They accepted me when others wouldn't," says a heavyset 60-ish man who's got "widower" stamped on him. "Ocean Finance really, really helped me," says a black woman you can just see at the Pentecostal Sunday service.

It all seems locked into mortgages. "Thousands of home owners benefit. They consolidate existing mortgages, or they raise money for that special purchase," says Raymond/Hughie.

I'd like to know how Ocean Finance works and what it's done to create these testimonials. And I'd like to know what's going to happen to these people. It's poignant, because it sounds as if credit has really made a difference. Be aware, Ocean Finance, that your cut-price, utterly banal ad is redeemed, positively elevated, by the great people you've got pitching for you.

peter@sru.co.uk