How does a bank reach tertiary students? Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand solved the tricky part – Where?
The social bank, aka ASB Bank New Zealand, has done well to date using Saatchi & Saatchi’s ideas on Facebook (Like Loan) to reach home loan seekers and LinkedIn (Ambition) to reach businesses.
In fact, Like Loan, won one of only four Golds at the inaugural WARC Social Strategy Awards in London last year. It was a world-first in the financial services industry – a home loan rate powered by ‘likes’.
In 2013 (and again in 2014), Facebook users got to determine ASB’s loan rate according to how many people ‘liked’ the rate through a dedicated Facebook app on a given day. The more ‘likes’ the rate received, the lower it went. Each week, one winner secured a year’s loan at the finishing rate. The campaign produced home loan rates as low as 1.15% in 2013. In 2014, the idea was repeated with a bonus – the real-time decreasing rate on Facebook was integrated live into TV adverts on TVNZ channels.
This time, ASB’s target is eighteen to twenty-something. And they hang out on Snapchat. So that’s where Saatchi & Saatchi placed its campaign, the ASB Snap Scholarships.
Saatchi & Saatchi’s senior digital strategist, Ian Hulme explained, “We already know that students are a notoriously hard audience to reach and they are numb to any media channel being used traditionally. So it wasn’t enough to just be ‘where the kids are’, we needed to do something authentic and entertaining, and most importantly, be true to the platform.”
The campaign entertains and rewards young participants while it opens up a line of communication for students and apprentices to connect with ASB to talk about their banking.
Each week, one of a series of scholarship challenges will be released under the My Story section. From Snapchat, users are directed to a purpose built, mobile optimised website, to submit their answer and contact details. This gives them the chance to win anything from McDonalds and Spotify vouchers to festival tickets, PlayStation 4 consoles and iPhone 6 handsets.
As well as weekly prizes, every individual challenge entered correctly also gains one entry into a draw to win the grand scholarship of $10,000 cash. This will be deposited into an ASB Tertiary account, which the winner can put towards their tuition fees or apprenticeship set-up costs.
The heroes of the campaign are quirky Snapchat finger characters who deliver messages in Snapchat and supporting media, and are the competition’s likeable guides.
Snap Scholarships will be promoted over an 11-week period through a series of online and pre-roll videos, Spotify and Pandora activity, radio on air ad-libs and Facebook promotions, encouraging people to add “ASBBank” on Snapchat.
Creative credits:
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi
Executive creative directors: Corey Chalmers & Guy Roberts
Creatives: Thomas Marcusson, Charlie Godinet & Phil Hickes
Director of strategy: Murray Streets
Senior digital strategist: Ian Hulme
Digital production director: Lorraine Guerin
Digital producer: Brendan Haddock
Information architect: Sarah Kelliher
Digital designer: Megan Ying
Senior front-end developer: Georgy Malanichev
Systems engineer/back-end developer: Dmitry Shumkov
Senior flash developer: Steven Ashby
Senior designer: Chris Leskovsek
TV producer: Anna Kennedy
Animator: Tomas Cottle
