Canada has the worlds 11th largest GDP from a population of 35,000,000. Our proximity to the United States drives our economy and represents 80% of our trade. As a result, many global companies choose to run their marketing strategy in the United States with slight adaptations for the Canadian Market. As such, native media innovation lags compared to other countries and brands typically opt for more traditional approaches. The brands that have the capacity to innovate locally are the few homegrown powerhouses in regulated industries such as banking, travel, teleco, etc. These companies spearheading innovation is key for the Canadian industry, however few companies have the resources to do so explains why Canadians are behind the times when it comes to branded entertainment.

#TDThanksYou involved real customers who received real surprises from their bank. The strategy was for audiences to form emotional connections with these customers and be equally moved by the gesture of appreciation from a bank. As such, their stories garnered interest from media sources across North America and drove audiences from traditional media to online. In the social space the strategy was to be ubiquitous on launch day and move as quickly as possible from paid to earned, enhancing not interrupting the user experience. TD partnered with YouTube TrueView and orchestrated a target block on facebook for launch day.

The #TDThanksYou campaign was an overwhelming success by any metric.

The publication, The Financial Brand declared it the “Fastest viral mega-hit in the history of banking”. Google called it the most watched video ad on its platform in Canada in 2014 and one of the most watched in the U.S. On Twitter, TD was receiving 1200 tweets/hour, which is all the more impressive considering 97% of financial brands on Twitter don’t get 1200 tweets about them in an entire year. To date, the video has 20,658,946 views with over 70% of views driven by organic sharing. An independent Google study showed 3.6M Canadians claimed the video positively changed brand impression while 1.2 million claimed it added to their already favourable impression of TD. Even pop culture embraced the video as BuzzFeed declared #TDThanksYou an international hit and one of the top 10 reasons Canadians should be proud to be Canadian.