2012 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

Mashreq, one of the region’s largest private banks, launched its online banking service, MashreqOnline, five years ago. Since then, the number of users has been growing steadily, but Mashreq was looking to aggressively push more users towards this service for a number of reasons – to reduce the impact on the environment and the cost associated with printing and posting thousands of credit card / bank statements every month. They wanted to convince their customers to make the switch to online banking. Our challenge was to communicate this to existing Mashreq customers through a cost effective DM.

Creative Execution

Fingerprinting is mostly associated with security and crime. Our idea used this to demonstrate the risks associated with receiving important documents by post. The cost involved was very low – we simply lined existing Mashreq envelopes with carbon paper that would naturally get smudged with fingerprints on its way to our target audience. This alerted them to the fact that there was no one between them and their personal banking information if only they conducted their transactions online.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

A simple, flat direct mailer that addressed one of the biggest concerns customers have about receiving important documents by post – confidentiality. We created envelopes lined with old-fashioned carbon paper, and placed a letter inside these envelopes. When recipients opened the envelope and removed the letter, it was smudged with the fingerprints of all the people whose hands it had passed through. This gave us the opportunity to make our point – that the letter could have potentially been compromised so many times before it reached the person it was meant for. We asked our audience to switch to MashreqOnline and avoid such security risks by banking online.

Results

After we mailed out 70,000 mailers to our prospect, the number of users who signed up for MashreqOnline saw a big spike, with the total moving from 110,000 to 143,073 in a span of two months. This response rate of 47% was achieved at a minimal cost to our client. The number of users also saw an icnrease of 30%.