Howard Brown is a British singer and former HBOS customer-services representative who became the recognizable face of Halifax's staff-as-stars advertising campaign from 2000. He later released a charity single that reached number 13 on the UK Singles Chart and appeared in television programmes including The Office Christmas special.
Background
Howard Brown was born in 1966 in Sheldon, Birmingham, England. Sheldon is an eastern Birmingham suburb whose development was shaped by the expansion of the city and its transport connections to the wider West Midlands.
Brown is of Barbadian descent. His public career developed within Britain's commercial television culture of the early twenty-first century, when banks increasingly used distinctive advertising campaigns to give financial brands a recognizable popular image.
Education
Brown studied stage, music and performance at Solihull College in the West Midlands. The college provides further and higher education and vocational training for communities in Solihull and the surrounding Birmingham area, including creative and performing-arts subjects.
Career
Brown worked for HBOS Group, the banking group associated with Halifax and Bank of Scotland, from 1994 until 2011. He began as a customer-services representative at the Sheldon branch in Birmingham, where his work placed him in the customer-facing environment of a major British retail bank.
In 2000, Halifax selected Brown through an internal audition to front its new staff-as-stars advertising campaign. His first major appearance used rewritten lyrics to Mousse T and Tom Jones's “Sex Bomb,” and the campaign subsequently placed him in a series of musical television commercials featuring singing, dancing and elaborate production. The campaign made Brown a recognizable advertising personality and led to television appearances and personal appearances on behalf of the bank.
Brown continued to feature in Halifax campaigns during the 2000s, including advertisements built around songs associated with Shaggy, Barry White and other popular performers. Bank of Scotland stopped using him in its advertising in 2004, while Halifax continued to feature him until a change in advertising strategy in 2008. From April 2008 he worked in HBOS's public-relations department, and he left the company in 2011.
Brown later returned to screen and advertising work. He appeared as himself in the BBC's 2003 The Office Christmas special, made a cameo appearance in a Hotels.com commercial in 2017, and appeared on the television programme First Dates in 2020 and Hypothetical in 2021.
