A bank of few words: Cambridge Trust Co. promotes itself with text-only print campaign.

It's a marketing issue faced by many community banks: How do you attract prospects annoyed by the decline in service at their own recently acquired banks?

Cambridge Trust Co., Cambridge, Mass., recently ran a series of straightforward print ads designed to tackle this problem by reminding customers of soon-to-be-acquired banks that Cambridge Trust is a "community banking alternative."

The text-only ads featured brief one- or two-sentence descriptions of community banking "advantages," followed by the tag line, "Welcome back to banking." The ad's simplicity reinforced the impression of "basic, old-fashioned personalized service."

Cambridge Trust has $1.5 billion in assets and nine locations in Boston and its suburbs. The agency was Philip Johnson Associates, Cambridge, Mass.