The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2023
Tangerine films a life of literal hoops to sell banking without the bureaucracy
Tangerine's 'Jumping Through Hoops' makes the cliché literal: one man's life is a gauntlet of hoops until a simpler bank lets him above them.
Tangerine
What it had to solve
Tangerine is a bank built on simplifying one of the most complicated and pervasive parts of life: finances. The campaign needed to make that difference felt against a culture full of needless steps and processes, not just claimed in a voiceover.
How it works
Life is filled with unnecessarily complicated steps and processes, and finance is one of the most complicated and pervasive of them all. Tangerine, a bank built on simplifying money, needed to say that it removes the hassle in a way people could feel rather than merely hear.
Jumping Through Hoops made the complaint literal. The film visualises a world that looks as bureaucratic as ours feels, with the protagonist slogging and stumbling through a life riddled with hoops — every ordinary task another obstacle to climb through.
Frustrated with this world, he discovers Tangerine, a bank dedicated to simplifying finances rather than making people navigate yet more hoops, and rises above the looped world. D&AD carries the film in its awards archive.
Why it lands
- The cliché does the explaining: viewers already know the feeling of jumping through hoops, so the film never has to argue its point.
- Making the metaphor literal turns an abstract complaint into something visible, concrete and easy to talk about.
- Tangerine enters the story as the way out of the hoops rather than another process to endure, embodying its positioning instead of asserting it.
- The campaign dramatizes the customer's everyday pain before offering the relief, so the promise reads as empathy rather than salesmanship.
What it did
The archive records no engagement figures; the effect is that the cliché became visible — a hooped world audiences recognized as their own, with Tangerine positioned as the way out of it rather than as one more process. D&AD carries the film in its awards archive.
What you can take
Take the customer's complaint literally: when an audience already speaks about your category in a cliché, put that cliché on screen and place your brand as the exit.
Since then
The film aired in March 2023 as agency Rethink's first major brand work for Tangerine, went on to win recognition in Canadian industry awards, and is carried in the D&AD awards archive. The archive records no reach or sales figures, so what endures is the image: a bank's promise made literal, with the customer shown escaping the hoops.
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