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Agency Saint@RKCR/Y&R’s campaign for Lloyds TSB got users creating and sharing their own content. Creative Director David Gamble talks to Figaro about surrendering control of the brand
How, at a time when public confidence in the banking industry is at an all time low, do you go about raising engagement and warming the chilly attitudes of a disengaged audience? This was among the challenges faced by digital agency Saint@RKCR/Y&R, whose Lloydstsbme.com campaign won in the Financial Services sector at the 2011 BIMAs. The campaign, which represented a strategic departure for Lloyds TSB, provided users with a new platform through which to engage with the brand, and was designed to take the bank’s marketing out into the social sphere.
Bank of me
Launched in December 2010, Lloydstsbme.com lets users create and upload their own avatars into the animated world which has featured in the bank’s advertising since their ‘For The Journey’ campaign launched in 2007. By going to a dedicated microsite, visiting the Facebook app or interacting with banners, users were able to build and personalise their characters, upload them to a gallery on Facebook, then share and comment on each other’s work. Creative and inherently sociable, there was also a competitive element: one avatar would be selected to appear in a new TV ad made by animator Mark Craste, creator of the ‘For The Journey’ world at Studio AKA.
“There wasn’t really a brief at the beginning,” says Saint@RKCR/Y&R’s Creative Director David Gamble. In the past, he explains, Lloyds TSB’s marketing strategies tended to be built around specific products and campaign windows. “Anything that needed a bit of longevity, constant updates or which wandered into social media was generally avoided because they weren’t yet geared up for it.”
In a break with that tradition, Lloydstsbme.com wasn’t associated with any specific product. Instead, at a time when the mere fact of being a bank brought problems of perception, the aim of the campaign was “to allow the bank to get closer to people and understand their needs. We saw this as an opportunity to surrender some control of the brand. We wanted to look at what was happening in the real world and embrace it. We wanted to make Lloyds bank your bank – regardless of whether you’re a customer or not.”
Social capital
As with many institutions operating in the service-led sector, the relationship between consumers and their banks is born out of necessity rather than choice: if I want a mortgage I have no choice but to go to a bank and apply for one. Inevitably, that makes for an unequal balance of power, compounded by the vast range and complexity of different services on offer.
“But,” says Gamble, “there’s the opportunity for this to be a much more positive relationship. Banks used to be at the heart of the community. We’d give them our money to look after and they’d invest it. People understood that. People don’t understand what banks are now.
It was for this reason, he explains, that users were placed at the centre of the campaign, and the campaign itself was designed to be explicitly social. “Right from the start we believed that Lloyds had a fantastic opportunity to lead, and to lead at a time when banks were almost considered the enemy. It was about turning the public face of Lloyds over to users and inviting them to become part of the Lloyds world.”
The first strategic decision was to design something fun, creative and social. “There’s nothing new about avatars, of course,” says Gamble. “But for Lloyds it was a big step because they’d never done anything like that before.” With a microsite very similar in look and feel to the bank’s main site, the creative aspect enabled users to create detailed, personalised avatars simply and quickly. Once these were uploaded to the Facebook gallery, other users could comment and share, and though the number of ‘likes’ each avatar received was no guarantee of success in the competition to win a spot in the TV ad - that was the personal decision of animator Mark Craste - it did tap into an important aspect of the way we all use social media. “The whole campaign,” Gamble explains, “was aimed at giving people the chance to do something we tend to do in social media anyway, which is to make ourselves the centre of attention.”
Power to the people
These sorts of insights into the way we actually use the net are vital for brands, agencies and marketers. Social media, after all, can be unpredictable; understanding effective prompts and inducements enables marketers to tailor their campaigns to match specific modes of user behaviour. And that’s particularly significant for organisations operating in areas like finance, where trust and engagement are hugely significant yet tricky to realise.
“Brands have always had the power,” says Gamble. “They’ve always dictated and presented themselves in the ways they wanted. The conversation is therefore generally quite limited. The internet - not just social media, but generally - has allowed people to share things very quickly. Brands are now starting to realise that people are going to have those conversations regardless. It can be a difficult thing for corporations to deal with. What we’ve always said is brands need to try and lead the conversation rather than have it come to them.” In the case of Lloydstsbme.com, the nature of the content itself was significant. “We’re not talking about a product,” says Gamble.“We’re not talking about Lloyds bank. We’re not attempting to address any other wider issues. You can do all that on the bank’s main website. We’re talking about you, because we want you to create something.”
Friends with benefits
Once the campaign was up and running the avatars started coming thick and fast. The main site received a hefty 90,000 visits on the morning of its launch. Dave Gorman, Danny Wallace and Fearne Cotton were among 15 celebrities recruited to endorse it. Over the course of the campaign there were almost 150,000 avatars created and 50,000 entries to the competition. Brand consideration swelled while interaction ballooned. Interestingly, given the anxieties which inevitably attend a brand’s first major foray into social media, there was zero adverse user comment.
“The site was moderated,” says Gamble. “As was the Facebook gallery, and out of the 150,000 creations we had there, there were only three things we had to moderate, and that’s because people were saying horrible things about other people’s avatars. Literally nothing bad was said about the bank by all these hundreds of thousands of comments, made in a climate which is very bank-negative.”
Animator Marc Craste eventually chose the winning avatar and incorporated it into the Lloyds TSB 2012 Olympics ad. (Lloyds TSB are the official banking and insurance partner of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.) And though the competition has now closed, users can still create their own mini-mes. As well as the Financial Services BIMA, Saint@RKCR/Y&R racked up a further three nominations, suggesting innovation needn’t mean complication.
So what further lessons does Gamble think the success of a campaign like this teaches? “For a corporation, the real reach is getting people’s attention through friends of friends of friends,” he says. “It’s about creating and sharing stuff that can bring friends into the conversation, and giving some control back to people.”
Article by Jon Fortgang
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