Agency: Notorious Communications
Category: Most effective campaign
Challenge
Coventry Building Society (CBS) cares about its members’ savings — so much so, it worried marketing would be a waste of their money. It’s the second biggest UK building society, but brand health was slipping after a long period without advertising. With its core audience of older savers shopping around, CBS was losing out to stronger brand propositions. It needed to invest in advertising to drive both awareness and account openings. This would mean getting in front of the right people in a cluttered market and communicating the reasons – beyond APR – to pick the society. What’s more, the campaign needed to be effective enough to counter internal resistance to longer-term advertising.
Approach
CBS’ brand proposition is all about decency: customer service, ethical standards and money that’s reliable and rewarding. Therefore, it needed to use channels that could authentically communicate this and had established trust with its audience. News brands were chosen as they command higher trust than other media — as proved by Newsworks’ ‘Trust’ study.
Without the budget of many of its competitors, CBS had to work smartly. The advertiser regionalised its ‘Wonderfully Decent Money’ campaign to target the wealthy southeast and pushed activity from March to October to take advantage of the ‘mini peak’ competitors tended to ignore.
CBS’s core audience think and talk about their money, so the creative and media strategy had to demonstrate the society were on the same page. The campaign launched with wraparounds of the Evening Standard, with content powered by the news brand’s journalists. Fabric’ takeovers of the Guardian’s Money section ran throughout the campaign. Elsewhere, CBS worked with Mail Metro Media to create a Wordle-like game in a display unit, tapping into its audience’s ‘crossword’ passion. Importantly, Ozone enabled smart digital targeting across all its news brand partners to connect seamlessly with CBS’s paid search and social.
Results
CBS notched up 615 direct attributed account openings by customers, representing £20 million of investment against a paid media spend of £840,000. In addition, each account was worth around £35,000 in investment, 60% more than CBS’s average.
Of those exposed to the campaign, EmotionaLogic reported 9% increase in brand awareness, 7% uplift in brand relevance and 19% increase in product page visits in the southeast versus control regions. In addition, 49% of search traffic came from non-branded search terms, showing the strength of the brand recognition in directing generic search to CBS.
