As has increasingly become clear, content marketing is an effective, progressive and less intrusive way of reaching an audience. The modern audience has less time for shouty or obvious tactics. We’ve grown smarter, wiser and more distracted with a myriad of content options to consume, particularly the millennial audience, which is spending less and less time in front of the television. While perhaps a few years ago it would have been hard to see it coming, banks have gotten very good at employing content marketing tactics, particularly when targeting a younger audience. We thought we’d take a look at a few examples from the main players.
Browsing: ASB
Since 1964, Kashin, the ASB moneybox, has been an inhabitant of countless Kiwi homes, serving as a tool used by parents to teach their kids about the value of money. However, at a time when coins have become something of a rarity, Kashin was becoming a largely unused anachronism—a white elephant, if you will. So, in response, ASB and Saatchi & Saatchi have given Kashin a digital makeover and introduced a new moneybox called Clever Kash.
The corporate world has long looked to professional athletes and coaches for guidance on how to perform better, how to create a positive culture and, if they’re being honest, how to grind their opposition into the dust. And ASB has looked to the All Blacks—or, more specifically, the team behind the All Blacks—to provide some pearls of wisdom for Kiwi businesses.
In most instances, losing an item is little more than a frustration, but it can be quite a major problem when the said item is a credit card. Usually, the relisation that a credit card is missing is followed by about 20 minutes of manic searching, 30 minutes of concern about where you were pick-pocketed and then the painful recognition that you’ll have to cancel the card for security’s sake. Then, once the card is cancelled, nothing is quite as annoying as finding the now useless piece of plastic lying in your wardrobe under your trousers and realising that it just fell out of the pocket of your jeans (yes, this is a personal experience).
Steinlager, Air New Zealand, ANZ, ASB and Cancer Society take centre stage this week.
Snapchat has fast become a popular way for brands to reach out to a younger audience. ASB, Vodafone, Spark the NZTA and a number of other brands and organisations have seen merit in using the platform and have reported successful results. And while a little late in the game, Stuff has just jumped on the Snapchat bandwagon and only three days since launching its account, it already has a few thousand ‘friends’, and counting.
Advertising can be a bit like a mirror, or perhaps more like the Mirror of Erised (cue cheesy reference) from Harry Potter where an idealised version of ourselves is reflected back at us. When targeted well it can be so pervasive that we come to think of advertising scenarios as being normal “Of course I should be wearing those shoes”, “Clearly I need that marble bench top in my kitchen”. Advertisers try to reflect our relationships too, marketing to couples and families. But wouldn’t it be strange to see advertising bypass us, for us to see ads embodying relationships or representations of people that don’t reflect our reality. For the reported 10 to 15 percent of New Zealanders that make up our LGBT community, it has been like this for a long time. But things are changing, the world is slowly but surely progressing, and so is the advertising world along with it. Here are a few examples of advertising that includes this community, and why it would be of interest for advertisers to continue doing so, particularly in light of gay marriage increasingly becoming legalised in more countries.
As Snapchat has nudged its way into the advertising world over the past year, businesses have made use of the tool to reach out to a younger audience. One of these businesses is ASB Bank, which has seen huge success through its use of Snapchat to reach tertiary students, and ASB general manager of marketing Shane Evans says it plans to keep using it.
News from ASB, NZME, MediaWorks, Sugar & Partners, Datalicious, Yahoo New Zealand, CanTeen, Bite and NZ Women’s Weekly.
Changes at ASB, Starcom/ZO, TVNZ, Ambient Group, MediaWorks and Fonterra.
The way the world is going, it probably won’t be too long before the mobile phone renders cards obsolete. But until that happens, ASB is using the phone to make using cards easier by allowing customers to set temporary locks and maximum withdrawals and restrict contactless, international and online payments.
A congratulatory bum pat to Anchor, ASB, Pump and the Warriors this week.
ASB is the latest brand to bask in the reflected glow of the All Blacks after its partnership with New Zealand Rugby was announced today. And, in celebration, the bank has rebranded for a day.
ASB and Saatchi & Saatchi NZ have previously shown their prowess for Facebook campaigns through the hugely successful ‘Like Loan’ iniative, and the pair have now returned to the platform. But rather than focusing on home loans, the latest campaign aims to convince Kiwis to take up life insurance. The new campaign takes the form of a survey in a series of questions that aim to determine if you’re replaceable.
Every year around this time, banks attempt to grease up the young’uns heading off to expand/erode their minds at University. But banks are rarely at the top of the priorities list at this stage of life and erecting a makeshift tent and handing out branded pens at a festival or over Orientation Week just doesn’t cut it anymore. So ASB is running a Snapchat campaign called Snap Scholarships—replete with the obligatory prizes—to try and lure them in.
The internet loves animals. According to CBS, a remarkable, nigh-on unbelievable, 15 percent of internet traffic is cat-related. And dogs probably aren’t far behind. Chuck in a celebrity or two and a well-made video and you’ve got all the ingredients required for modern-day marketing gold, as ASB can now attest after its promotional stunt for the ASB Classic tennis tournament received plenty of love.
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.
With the launch of Apple Pay last month, Semble last week and various other schemes, being able to pay with your mobile phone is fast becoming a reality. But bank customers have been doing it for a few years now. And ASB says financial transactions through its mobile app have increased by two thirds in the past year, pushing internet banking firmly into second place.
Several weeks ago, Spark released the latest iteration of its ‘Never Stop Starting’ positioning via a 30-second spot that depicted a protagonist using Spark’s mobile payment technology across a varied range of jobs in different locations. And the telecommunications giant isn’t the only one dabbling in this space. We take a look at some of the recent moves made the major players.
On election night, MediaWorks collaborated with SparkPHD and digital media agency Ngage to feed live election results onto APN Outdoor’s digital billboard network around Auckland, making TV3 the latest brand to adopt a digital approach to outdoor advertising. So given all the hype centred on the versatility and effectiveness of digital OOH advertising, where does this leave traditional outdoor advertising? And is the growth of digital also starting to affect other industries?
Back in 2010, Mintel’s Michael Oliver charted the rise of middle-aged men wearing lycra and their big impact on the cycling market (the BBC covered the emerging trend of the MAMIL soon after). Since then, it’s become a fairly widely used term, often disparagingly, and there are plenty of Kiwi chaps who appear to have swapped the flashy sportscar for the flashy roadbike—or at least added to it—as part of the obligatory mid life crisis. Now, in a continuation of ASB and Saatchi & Saatchi’s latest campaign that focuses on the type of conversations the bank believes New Zealanders actually have about money, it’s combined cycling with another one of the nation’s loves: property.
Bikers, robots and solitary actors star for Hallenstein Brothers, ASB and Noel Leeming in this week’s edition.
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.
Having cash in the wallet is an increasingly rare phenomenon for many Kiwis. So is throwing your wallet into the bin in favour of using your phone or a digital currency an option in New Zealand? And what’s ‘coming soon’? We’ve cherry-picked a few interesting developments in the payment space.
ASB, McDonald’s and a double from Air New Zealand lift the cup this week.
This week Ian Thorpe revealed he was gay in an interview with Michael Parkinson. A few months back, Michael Sam and Jason Collins became the first openly gay men to be drafted into the NFL and NBA respectively. And New Zealand and many other nations have legalised gay marriage. So progress is certainly being made in the area of gay rights, at least in the developed world. But there’s still a long way to go. And as John Browne’s book The Glass Closet, ASB’s response to Thorpe’s news and OUTLine’s 100% OK campaign show, the business community can lead the way.
ASB has launched a new campaign via Saatchi & Saatchi to draw attention to its GetWise initiative, which has been created to educate kids on how to be smarter with money. In the new 60-second spot called ‘Creating cash-clever Kiwis’, a series of adorable kids are depicted giving imaginative answers to questions about money. Then, once the kids have had their say, a narrator interjects saying that ‘kids have some funny ideas about money’ before prompting viewers to visit the GetWise section of the website.