Today I hope to answer the burning question: Do Americans really need an ad campaign featuring a giant living piggy bank to help them save up a few extra pennies?

Benjamin Bankes: Part Pig, Part Pimp, All Pink.

The American Institute of Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) apparently thinks they do. They’ve teamed up with The Advertising Council (of course!) to develop an entire television and web video ad campaign called FeedThePig.org. The ads feature a human-sized anthropomorphic pig named Benjamin Bankes (played by likable actor Austin Basis) who goes around convincing people to “feed the pig” by spending wisely and giving him some of their cash. So, yes, most of the commercials resemble a surreal scene where people get mugged by giant pigs and yes, it’s all a little confusing. See, the phrase “Feed The Pig” is referring to the act of putting money into a piggy bank. So when you put away some money you’re feeding the piggy bank some cash and, in the process, saving a few dollars.

The “feeding” of the pig is never really shown well. In on commercial coins drop from the sky and automagically sink into his head, in another commercial two women shove money into his pockets and in a third commercial a guy in cube hands over his paycheck. One has to wonder if this is a piggy bank or a drug dealing super pimp sort of a pig. The concept is that whenever you save money or spend wisely you’re giving me to your piggy bank. Yes, it’s a stretch but it works… a little bit.

The commercials are quick and when you first see them and the giant pig really catches your eye… but I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Maybe they were a little too good with the make-up, maybe the concept just doesn’t work or maybe I have some sort of unnatural fear of my bacon being able to chase me down the street and beat me up, but the pig creeps me out, folks. He kind of looks like that cow that talks to Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect and begs to be eaten at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe in the original TV mini-series of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, doesn’t he? Oh, go Google it.

The Feed The Pig website is big on style and short on substance. The front page introduces us to “ourselves” as we look at our financial mirror and gives us this little nugget: “You now have the second highest rate of personal bankruptcy in the nation.”

Umm… What? How can I as an individual have the second highest rate of personal bankruptcy in the nation? Compared to what? My neighbor? The world? This year? This month? Huh?

Like most financial websites, there are a couple calculators (a Lunch Savings Calculator and a Credit Card Payoff Calculator), plenty of money saving tips, an email newsletter, an archive of the current videos and a few financial articles and links that mostly seem to come from the much more useful 360 Financial Literacy website also put together by the AICPA. You can download if you can’t get enough of the Mr. Benjamin Bankes. Personally, I could.

Are the commercials edgy and eye-catching? Yes. Are they entertaining? Sure. Will they convince me to save more money? I don’t know about that. Apparently everyone doesn’t agree with me, though. The commercials have won a number of awards (proving that advertising people mostly excel at giving themselves awards) and the AICPA has all sorts of Feed The Pig links, including a “behind the scenes” video, some financial reports about spending amongst young people and even some Feed The Pig merchandise which, thankfully, only includes drawn logos and not photos of Senior Porky himself.

These trinkets and items for sale convincingly prove that accountants are really heartless robots from another planet sent here on mission to secretly enslave us all. The entire ad campaign is based on smart spending and proper savings but the AICPA still offers a bunch of crappy overpriced coffee mugs, wall clocks and mouse pads which pretty much defines the idea of stupid spending. Apparently the AICPA is only against stupid spending when they aren’t the ones parting you from your cash.

With this stagnant economy it’s only a matter of time before some bonehead in Washington advocates “jump starting” the economy by having us all go out and spend all our money. If you save money by feeding the pig then you logically withdraw money by slaughtering the pig.

These commercials are creepy enough without seeing that…

Technorati Tags: feed the pig, saving money, accountants on LSD

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As I often do when I get a little bored with the idea of blogging, I’m going to introduce a new topic in an effort to spice things up.

Money. What else did you expect to see here?

You see, I’m a regular guy with a regular job, so I spend a lot of time thinking about regular things. One of the regular things I think the most (other than various people without clothes) is money. And because I’m a regular guy with a regular job I often find myself not having much of it.

Most of these thoughts about money are just that: idle thoughts. They have absolutely no merit, no usefulness and they are mostly pretty darn stupid. Most people have the luxury of getting stupid ideas and being able to forget them a few minutes later.

But not me. I’m a blogger. As a blogger it is my pleasure, nay, moral obligation to share these stupid ideas with millions of people on the internet. I do not take this responsibility lightly.

To make sure that I have a proper forum for my stupid ideas about money I’m going make yet another category here exclusively for stupid money ideas. I think I’m going to call it “Stupid Money Ideas.” I figure I’m uniquely qualified to write a personal finance blog about money for two reasons:

1. I’m a person.
2. I have finances.

And, besides, personal finance blogs are all the rage right now with people spilling their guts about how they over spent and under saved for years and now they’re blogging about how they spend every penny in hopes of digging their way out of debt and becoming a millionaire in the next two years. These blogs are filled with fairly stupid tips about saving money like, “I never throw pennies in fountains! Instead I save them up and at the end of the year I could have an extra 12 cents! Wow!”

Fear not, this will not be that kind of personal finance blog. You don’t care how I spend my money unless I do something incredibly illegal and even then you only care if I was kind enough to post photos. Most of my posts about money will be completely useless, stupid and a general waste of time. That’s worked for this blog over the last two years, so I don’t see any reason to change now.

Remember: if you take away anything useful from this site (and, really, most of the internet) then you’re surely dumber than you think you are.

Technorati Tags: money blog, personal finance, savings

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