Our goal was to educate our clients on the new technology while also representing our brand as the modern B2B company. If, after watching the VR video, our targets felt smarter and saw us as an innovative brand, then we succeeded.

We took the VR on a physical and virtual roadshow in an effort to reach all of our constituents. We made a list of every touch point we had with our B2B clients. Essentially, we blanketed their world with VR content in a variety of formats - from physical demonstrations to digestible infographics, earned press to paid social and everything in between.

This approach – to create a piece in the technology that is being examined – is novel for a bank, but more broadly, signals an important shift in our marketing toolkit; a way to combine storytelling, data visualization and education in an entertaining and insightful way.

For our internal audience, we launched the VR program with a massive full-wall screen showing the VR, multi-headset VR stations and LED VR posters at our senior leadership offsite. Every firm leader viewed the experience. Then we launched an internal roadshow at every business vertical offsite.

With leadership’s support, we executed global fairs in New York, Hong Kong and London, inviting entire office buildings to experience the VR. We launched an email series with invitation links before and then day of the event. We tacked printed posters throughout the offices to lend a fun, upbeat atmosphere.

The fairs filled entire floors with large screens showing the VR, multiple VR stations, experts answering any questions about the technology. We raffled a VR headset at each fair and after the fairs, we had write-ups about the piece with links to the work on our internal communications sites and in direct emails.

Our goal was to be innovative, modern and insightful as a brand and to provide our clients with the full education of the technology.

We broke records in every metric. Across all channels we had over 198M exposures and 802k video views, propelling the campaign to be the #1 most viewed in BofAML history. We were the #3 most viewed VR on Samsung, impressive for a B2B financial firm in a consumer space. The VR video was the #1 most visited page on BofAML’s website for over 6 months. Influencers validated our content and reached a new audience with luminaries in the tech field such as Amber Roy, engineer at Oculus commenting, “Did not expect this: 360 video by BofAML. Cool to see finance industry giants embracing #VR”. Our industry press coverage recognized a shift in our marketing toolkit as a proof point of this new era. Across social, users engaged with our work at above average benchmark rates. As a result, our brand sentiment sky rocketed up 100% with over 21.9M potential impressions.

The main success was from the reactions of our clients and our employees. 24k+ clients watched the piece and even requested VR demonstrations for their offices. Our internal VR fair for employees defied expectations, with lines from morning until night. Feedback such as “I learned so much,” “Your company is really forward thinking,” “I am so proud to work at BofAML,” followed the video, reflecting the momentum in BofAML brand perception to a modern firm.