The FreeCreditReport.com Band
The floppy-haired slacker singing cheerful songs about his ruined credit — stuck working a pirate-themed seafood restaurant, driving a beater, living with his in-laws. Experian's jingle campaign was catchy enough to get stuck in the whole country's head, and misleading enough that a 2009 law made the ads carry a disclaimer.
FreeCreditReport.com belonged to Experian Consumer Direct, a subsidiary of the credit bureau Experian, and in October 2007 The Martin Agency gave it one of the stickiest ad campaigns of the decade: a scruffy singer-songwriter and his band narrating, in upbeat jingle form, all the ways bad credit had wrecked his life. Nine spots ran the premise everywhere — waiting tables in full costume at a pirate-themed seafood restaurant, driving a sad used car, living in the in-laws' basement, working a Renaissance fair — each ending with the same chipper plug for checking your credit report.
The frontman everyone recognized was Eric Violette, a Montreal-born actor — and the voice wasn't his. Violette's French-Canadian accent didn't fit the everyman character, so his singing was dubbed by David Muhlenfeld, the composer of the songs themselves. One of the most famous voices in late-2000s advertising belonged to the guy who wrote the jingles, singing through an actor's face.
The joke underneath the joke: the 'free' report wasn't the free one. The federally mandated no-strings credit report lives at AnnualCreditReport.com, and the Credit CARD Act of 2009 forced ads like these to say so on screen — 'This is not the free credit report provided for by Federal law.' The campaign that made credit reports feel fun ended up legally required to point you somewhere else.
Experian retired the original band in February 2010, ran nationwide replace-the-band auditions that May, and crowned The American Secrets that August. The originals returned for a comeback campaign on June 15, 2012, but the artifact is those first recession-era spots — the sound of 2008 anxiety set to the happiest hooks on television.
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