While coming back from office by bus, I noticed this ad campaign. It’s been around for a while, but I haven’t paid attention so far: Poste Italiane is leveraging its impressive network of offices to offer a broader range of services, and money transfer seems a perfectly reasonable one. The ads say: "I am able to send money to Poland (and Morocco, Albania or Senegal) for as little as €5.

It is, in my opinion, a well-but-plainly-executed campaign: each character is depicted in an easily recognizable settlement, one that we stereotypically associate to his/her ethnicity: the polish nurse, the african construction worker and so on – all with a neat "regular employment" look, conveying a generic feel-good sensation.

But the campaign could have been a truly great one, if they just created a greater variety of characters, paying attention to different concentrations in different cities (now that I think of it: Serbs in Trieste are an obvious choice, but Serbia is not listed while Kosovo – not an independent country – is…). And, most of all, if they had written the text in the original language.

Disclaimer: in my intention, the title should say "I can send money to Belarus for as little as €5". I hope that Google language tools have not transformed my innocent sentence into something dangerous.