A Japanese man hands his granddaughter a box to store money and a coin. Having deposited it, she's not sure how to retrieve it and even her father can't work it out. It requires a secret method to be opened and this is representative of an encryption service now offered by HSBC.

We developed an unprecedented use of the Yahoo homepage, with a full-page takeover including the masthead. An MPU invited users to spot the secret message. Clicking on the MPU activated a zoom into the homepage itself, revealing a microscopic message embedded in one of the full stops. This gave users an impactful demonstration of how secret agents used microdot technology to stop information falling into the wrong hands.

To ensure a seamless animation when users initiated the takeover, we had to take a screenshot and recreate the entire homepage in vectors every half an hour.

For HPTO:•The Yahoo homepage takeover had over 11 million impressions and achieved a click-through rate of 0.35% – more than double the average for a Yahoo takeover.For the campaign as a whole:•HSBC was expecting a drop-off in Internet banking usage of 40%. As a result of our campaign, the drop-off rate was reduced by almost 25%.

•HSBC also set a brand metrics target for “Bank I can trust” at 26% for this campaign. We overshot our target by over 15%.