The content and media department aims to explain what 11Onze is, or rather, to teach it. It focuses the company’s communication on transmitting its values and desire to change everything.

Toni Mata, content and media director at 11Onze

Doesn’t it bother you when any bank or company that wants to sell you something treats you as if you had comprehension problems? As if the public, the potential client, were a herd that has to be given specific instructions to enter the enclosure? It really pisses me off. And I think that citizens (for companies: consumers) are starting to have enough audiovisual culture to understand when they are trying to make a fool of us and when they are not.

My work as head of the content and media department at 11Onze goes in a different direction. I like us to be useful, I like us to explain things as they are, and I like us to be unpredictable. That’s why we don’t hire expensive advertising agencies that would convince us of supposedly modern but preconceived ideas, with perfect photography and beautiful actors. We don’t do that. We are not interested in it. Everyone else is doing it. And it’s a bit of a laugh, to be honest.

Let me tell it with examples. When La Caixa makes an advert that looks like a Yankee college film in which it tells us about a boy who has been helped and doesn’t know whether to become a trap singer or play American football… it’s all very well, but it’s a lie. I’m from Sabadell and this was filmed on the JAS (Sabadell Athletic Youth) tracks, with the beautiful gorges of the Ripoll in the background. The problem is that there is no American football team in Sabadell and the rugby teams in the city (which are at the other end of Sabadell, not there) don’t know about this guy.

However, if you look up Munic HB, you’ll see that he does do very well in music, although, of course, this is perhaps not the image that the promoters of the advert want. It’s the Les Termes neighbourhood of Sabadell, which looks more like the Baltimore of The Wire than the upper Diagonal of the Valencian entity’s directors. In short, it’s all a lie. They have spent a lot of money to tell us a fairy tale because they must not like the truth, the suburban reality.

A bath of reality

We are different here. At 11Onze we show how the reality is. Pretty? Ugly? It doesn’t matter, it’s the one we have. It’s not just La Caixa that does this, everybody does it, in a pitiful race to sweeten the world instead of making it understandable or transforming it.

For me, these are the axes of 11Onze’s communication. To begin with, we use the Magazine, 11Onze Podcast, 11Onze TV and Learning to understand how the economy works, and what the mechanisms of the financial world are. Because, whether we like it or not, this is the music that plays. Therefore, it is better that we learn to dance to it. 

Once the community is big enough, we will try to change the music. Because the next step is to transform reality, although we will have to do that together. That’s why our workers make the effort to make topics of interest accessible to us, to bring to the table knowledge that we must have. And for the same transformative motive, we like to have young voices like those of Pasta Z or people who put ideas into action that they believe in and that we are discovering in Promoters. This is what we want: people who look at the world, question what they can do and set about building it. From the bottom up.

Aversion to lies

You see, I’m a writer, a journalist by training and a scriptwriter for entertainment programmes. It’s a strange jumble, I know. I say this so that you understand my absolute aversion to artifice and lies. When a writer writes from the heart, things that matter to him, it shows. When a journalist explains the facts, it’s clear, no need to twist the explanation. When a scriptwriter is funny, people either laugh or don’t laugh. Well, for me, the way business should work should follow these guidelines: if what your company does is good for people, do it. If not, shut down. If what you have to say is true, say it. If not, shut down. If you want to tell a story, make it interesting. If not, shut it down. Don’t waste my time.

That’s why for me the truth doesn’t surpass fiction, it crushes it. Lies (in banking, in advertising, in politics, in marketing) have done too much damage and have debased communication. Too much. We no longer know what is true and what is a lie. Corporate messages and disinformation are mixed in an inseparable amalgam, which is why we launched 11Onze Check, because we have had enough of this whorehouse where the banks and the media lie down all the time. We have the right not to be fooled.

The weight of the documentary

In short: my challenge is quite amusing, among other things because I can see how the old model is bleeding to death trying to do what we do, which is unnatural for them. We just have to put cameras on the day-to-day life of 11Onze, giving a lot of weight to the documentary. With 11Onze’s Academy, we showed how we trained the workers; with Introducing, they discovered the first bosses of 11Onze; with In a Few Days, we showed the launching process of El Canut and we uncovered all the obstacles that the traditional banks put in our way. What else will we do? Continue telling this story. We are only in the first season.

We have come to learn, to grow together, to shred the lies and to change what we don’t like. And what’s more, we’ll do it with a party, dancing the rumba. Have you ever seen a financial institution advertised by gipsies? Well, we have come to do things that have never been done before.

11Onze is the community fintech of Catalonia. Open an account by downloading the super app El Canut for Android or iOS and join the revolution!