Cannes Lions

I just call to make an ad

McCANN SAN JOSE / BANCO NACIONAL DE COSTA RICA / 2019

Demo Film
MP3 Original Language
Supporting Images

Overview

Entries

Credits

Overview

Background

Young people don't think about saving money to buy a house. They do it for smaller, more inmediate rewards, such as a trip, a tattoo or a ticket to a concert.

Banco Nacional set a campaign aimed at young people, to let them know that it understood these needs and had a unique account, easy to open and perfectly tailored as a savings tool for them. This campaign had two clear goals in terms of communication: 1.Show young people that Banco Nacional understands their needs, and 2. Interact with them so they feel that saving is an actual possibility and not a distant more adult practice.

Idea

Through data analysis and social listening we concluded that young people got in “savings mode“ when they wanted to accomplish certain goal, but the bank had never showed them an example of how it got in savings mode. That's when the idea hit us. We needed to show them that we, the biggest bank in Central America, could get save too. After this creative notion took place, we decided to find the best media possible to carry it through, and realized that live calls in radio shows were funny, popular and best of all, free. So, by calling radio shows and making our ad in a live call, we would still have presence in the show, but would do so while giving an example of us being in savings mode as well.

Strategy

We wanted to reach young people, between the ages of 20 and 25. For this idea we needed to be a little subversive, so we reviewed our media planning tools and targeted the top 3 radio stations for this audience, and the highest rated shows from each one. We then used the bank's own call center and set a somewhat rudimentary, yet ironically innovative method of...just calling everyday to these shows and hope for the best. Since we were doing this for real, we had no guarantee that the calls would actually get answered live, and many were the shows we missed, but many more the ones on which we actually succeded, having over 50 calls answered, which meant 50 free radio ads, in a period of approx. 20 days.

Execution

People from the bank's call center called the radio shows as soon as they opened the line. This meant they had to listen to the entire show and be quick to be the first ones to call, since this shows are very popular and often get overwelmed by callers. They would also leave Whatsapp audio messages that, in some cases, have replaced the live calls. We chose both morning and afternoons shows to reach a wider young audience and also to build a tension factor with the radio hosts, who, by the end of our calling days, were a bit mad at us and usually just hung up the phone, which was actually quite fun for our listeners.

Outcome

We made over 50 live ads to the highest rated radio shows, for $0 and generated extra content through follow up conversations among the hosts, that we couldn't have had otherwise.

We also reached around 430,000 young people. and actively contributed to shift the more conventional-sort-of-expected message from a Bank, into a totally different more interactive live advice from a brand that actually cares enough about its message to actually make an example from it. Plus, the bank opened 20% more accounts during that month, compared to the previous year.