Opinion BY Armin

A LendingTree Grows in the Web

It’s almost unbelievable that LendingTree is ten years old, it seems just like yesterday when online ventures offering mortgage applications, stock trading and book purchasing seemed like wahoo ideas that would never take hold. Yet, here we are, ten years later and the leanest ideas have survived. Surprisingly among them, given the real estate downturn of the last couple of years, LendingTree which has just launched a completely new range of offerings on top of its mortgage game supported by a new identity, marketing and national advertising campaign, all done by Mullen.

Last year, the parent company of LendingTree, Tree.com, spun off from its previous owner IAC/InterActiveCorp which owns more than thirty major web sites, among them Vimeo, Ask.com and Match.com. To survive on their own, Tree.com CMO Darren Beck explains:

As part of IAC we could focus purely on mortgages, and IAC with all its various companies would be diversified enough to weather whatever economic or financial changes happened. Alone, however, we couldn’t be solely reliant upon mortgage. So we started to look at other products. […] We’ve already launched our InsuranceTree product, we launched DegreeTree, which is about education, and we’ll be launching more as the months come.
— Advertising Age interview

Landing on LendingTree now gives you the opportunity not just to find mortgages but to get home equity and auto loans, check your credit score or find a credit card. No question then, so far, that this is a new LendingTree and to make sure people know about it they have undergone a very drastic consumer-facing transformation.

What most people will see and remember are the new television ads featuring your everyday blueish white collar workers getting ready to face another day empowered by their superhero reflection with a voice-over by Adam “Batman” West. The line, “Today you are not just Scott, you are Great Scott” is bound to have some stickiness in the workplace and I’m sure we will start hearing people using it. It is kind of funny.

What is not funny, however, is the new LendingTree logo. While the idea of empowering the user and making a logo that feels tough, modern and secure is a good one, it’s hard not to be turned off by the Terminatoresque look of it. In contrast to the old logo, this seems to be saying “Be ready to play hard ball or don’t come at all.” The old logo made a process that is already scary and frustrating feel a little more peaceful with its gentle leaf blowing in the wind. In exchange, we have a lifeless green block that sits on top of an extremely unwelcoming wordmark. It ties in well with the superhero theme and look of the ads, but it feels like too much of a technology-focused logo that would look best on the latest gadget, not on a web site that puts your financial future in their hands.

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It's almost unbelievable that LendingTree is ten years old, it seems just like yesterday when online ventures offering mortgage applications, stock trading and book purchasing seemed like wahoo ideas that would never take hold. Yet, here we are, ten years later and the leanest ideas have survived. Surprisingly among them, given the real estate downturn of the last couple of years, LendingTree which has just launched a completely new range of offerings on top of its mortgage game supported by a new identity, marketing and national advertising campaign, all done by Mullen.

Many thanks to our ADV @ UnderConsideration Partners