This was a workday evening. I had settled into my side of the bed, feet up and a pillow cushioning my back against the hardness of the bedside cabinet. The TV was ritualistically on. I was looking at it without really watching it. This is when a comment from a dear friend flashed through my mind. He pays the price of his friendship with me by suffering through this column every week. In return, the least I could do was to give a lot of credence to what he has to say about Ad Lib.

He felt that it has been a while since we discussed an advertising campaign in this column. My immediate defence was that perhaps there has been no ad recently that could provoke discussion. The other possibility also lurked in my mind ? maybe I have not been paying attention. I felt guilty and focussed on the TV screen. Some old movie was on. Then came the commercial break and a plethora of ads filled the screen. Being summer months, Pepsi has got the new Priyanka Chopra campaign on air and Coke has got its old faithful Amir Khan to do a pseudo Japanese act. The former did not excite me enough to ponder, and the humour in the latter ad failed to tickle me.

This is when I saw the HSBC mutual fund ad. It was promoting a systematic investment plan. I guess the first thing that would strike one about this ad was its form. It had an overall black-and-white texture. More importantly, it was not a video but an animated sketch. Together they broke clutter. It seemed like the lady in white at a beach carnival, standing back a few steps from the festivities when everyone else was screaming for attention in their coloured beach clothing.

That however was my first impression. On repeat viewing, I recognised the master craftsmanship. The ad was using small black dots, appearing one after the other, to make a beautiful picture. Each sketch represented a dream: a dream house, a dream holiday? On the other hand, its message was simple: you don?t have to be rich to become richer. If you invest small sums of money every month systematically, you could earn handsome returns from the HSBC Mutual Funds. The monthly investment would be as low as Rs 1,000.

This HSBC ad signifies a major development. Not too long back, the banking industry was focussed totally on the corporate sector. Individual consumers were then considered unavoidable irritants. All that changed in the last decade or so. Home loans and car loans became popular. Then the mutual funds made their entry. In a way these banking products changed many consumer values. The policies of the government played their part too. Savings was no longer the obsession of the middle class. The era of ladder climbing began. Home loans and car loans were the stepping stone to the ladder. Mutual funds and IPOs were then seen as dependable steps to move up the ladder.

Banks, however, were somewhat unsure in this new arena. They possibly did not appreciate the huge role that they were playing not only economically but also socially. Unfamiliarity of the consumer territory did not help. The first few steps of the money minders were thus unsure, hesitant and often amateurish. The HSBC ad possibly signals the end of that pre-teen era. It connects to a consumer need ? a better life now rather than later.

For more reasons than one, this ad belongs to an extraordinary breed. It does not stop at the promise of making money; it translates money into a consumer dream. It aims to connect. Even creatively it excels. The small dots making the dream picture, beautifully depicts the basic concept of small sums every month yielding handsome returns. It is one of those rare instances of the head and the heart of the ad being in perfect unison.

Marriages they say are made in heaven. Sometimes they happen in a bank.