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Browsing: Anna Curzon
Changes at ASB, Starcom/ZO, TVNZ, Ambient Group, MediaWorks and Fonterra.
We asked some stalwarts a simple question. Here’s what Anna Curzon, general manager marketing at ASB, had to say.
Every day, around two million Kiwis log onto Facebook to scroll down their newsfeeds to see what is happening in their lives. And according to Stephen Scheeler, the company’s head of New Zealand, these aren’t sporadic single visits because the average user peruses the site around 15 times in a single day. “For those two million Kiwis on Facebook, about 12 percent of their media consumption is Facebook,” says Scheeler. “Remember, eight years ago it was zero. So this has been a massive shift.” The rapid migration of audiences into the digital realm is by no means surprising, but such statistics are increasingly serving as strong impetus for brands to shift their commercial messaging to where the eyes are. So we take a look at how brands are collaborating with the social media juggernaut to spread their commercial messages.
It’s fair to say the last major campaign launched by ASB didn’t go as well as planned, with the shouty, bearded frontman Brian Blessed being sent back to Blighty a bit earlier than expected. The bank’s Succeed On tagline remained, however, and, after being in a bit of a holding pattern as far as its comms were concerned, ASB has now returned with a new campaign via Saatchi & Saatchi that aims to show how New Zealanders really talk about money—and the ASB products and services that might be able to help them deal with it.
On the latest NZ Digital Podcast, host Paul Spain talks to ASB Bank’s online marketing team about its digital campaigns and social media activities, including #LikeLoan.
ASB has a good pedigree when it comes to using likeable characters in its marketing. And, after seven months of planning with its agency Saatchi & Saatchi, it’s hoping it has created another one after foisting the bearded, booming Brian Blessed on the nation to help get New Zealanders to celebrate success, no matter how small that success might be.
ASB has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most innovative banks, as evidenced by its inclusion on the Financial Brand’s list of ten brands to watch, the Top 35 Banks on Facebook and Top 35 Banks on Twitter. It was the first to launch internet banking in New Zealand in 1997, its virtual ‘Facebranch’ was an award-winning world-first, and its latest development has followed that trajectory by letting users pay Facebook friends through its updated mobile app. So is it digital gimmickry? Or is ASB adhering to its slogan and creating the future? We chat with general manager, brand experience and digital channels Anna Curzon.
Given Facebook’s pervasiveness, it’s not entirely surprising to learn the ‘Facebook in real life theme’ is already pretty fertile comedic territory. And ASB’s new agency Saatchi & Saatchi, with Thick as Thieves on production duties, has tapped into that idea for its first major piece of work for the bank, an online-only campaign to promote the new Facebook payments platform that shows what such a transaction might look like ‘IRL’.
Fresh from being named as New Zealand’s best online bank by Canstar, and following on from the world’s first virtual Facebook branch in late 2010, ASB has taken the next logical step, with users soon able to make payments directly to their Facebook friends.
For its latest customer service trick, ASB has fully embraced social media, gone completely virtual and launched a real-time, secure, person-to-person banking application on Facebook, something it claims is a world-first.