While watching clips from Saturday Night Live on Hulu.com I came across a cool new public service ad promoting responsible credit use and did some digging to see who was behind it.

As it turns out, the Ad Council (the leading producer of public service advertisements (PSAs) since 1942) has teamed up with The Consumer Bankers Foundation and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund to develop a campaign about simple steps you can take to improving your credit.  Perhaps a decade too late, it’s still good to see any effort by the debt industry to educate consumers about smart borrowing.

Here’s the PSA I saw posted on YouTube.

Banks providing support to the campaign include HSBC, SunTrust, Wachovia, Citigroup and National City.

The spots promote a new website with information on credit scoring, credit basics, managing credit and other information available across the web.  With the tagline “Take Charge of Your Credit” the website CreditFairy.org may make inroads where others have faltered because of this dedicated ad campaign.

The site is pretty bare-bones, so hopefully this is just the fist step towards a more robust resource for credit help.  Especially considering the roster of heavy-hitters in the banking industry who have put their names behind this effort.  The last thing we need in these very trying times are public relations efforts masquerading as real help for people struggling with debt, a shaky employment market and foreclosures.

Considering the sheer dollars that these banks have at their disposal (due in no small part to the American taxpayer and the government bailout programs) it would be nice to see more specifics on debt relief, a live chat feature with trained credit counselors and social media integration with Twitter and Facebook where people working through the debt crisis could get ongoing pointers.  In the modern age of the Internet a website and web commercials are nice, but we need more meat on these bones.