In the UAE, the branded content arena for banking and finance services is virtually non-existent. The only forms of branded content that banks and financial brands create are their film ads masquerading as branded content. They lack engagement, participation and hence, don’t become a part of people’s social conversations. Or they just create social media apps and activations that attempt to trigger conversations or get user generated content.
Emirates NBD is a leading bank in the UAE that creates effective branded content in the realm of financial literacy. Its YouTube channel is the leading YouTube channel among banks and financial institutions in the Middle East region.
And in an era of video being the most consumed and most preferred form of content, while we have always created effective functional content, we now faced the challenge and the opportunity to create more emotional content that would travel, that would be shared and that would trigger positive conversations about the Emirates NBD brand.
Results
All children think about their future. But, 73% of parents in the UAE have not had a conversation with their children about their future. (Source: Truth About Families, UAE, 2014)
To promote its new children’s savings plans to parents, Emirates NBD, Middle East’s leading bank, started that conversation, by creating a social experiment where we asked children to send a message to their future selves.
As an experiment, “Hey Future Me…” sought to know what about the future do children really think about.
And while the children spoke to their future selves, their parents watched.
Turns out, they seek many more achievements in their future than just the professions we imagine them in.
We targeted children with this social experiment via top schools in the country, enabling affluent parents to learn about their children’s real aspirations and resultantly, increase acquisitions for Emirates NBD’s children’s savings plan, under its Priority Banking proposition.
This is enabling Emirates NBD to strengthen and extend its retail distribution network for its Children’s Savings Plans as well as for additional products like Life Insurance, to schools via newer chapters of “Hey Future Me…” potentially aiming to expand it even to the Ministry of Education in 2015.
We created a unique social experiment that attracted children and their parents from all over the UAE across a new marketing channel for Emirates NBD: Schools.
The video was posted on YouTube and shared across Emirates NBD’s owned media touchpoints: (a) The Facebook page, (b) The Twitter profile, and (c) The YouTube channel. And it got more visibility via YouTube seeding as well as advertising.
Leading offline and online publications featured the idea across their platforms.
And it became a part of school curriculums (GEMS, Raffles, etc.) as a class project, reaching more children and their parents too.
BUSINESS OUTCOMES:
(1) +34% increase in online visits for savings plans.
(2) Engagement on site was 40% above regional benchmarks.
(3) 20% increase in savings plans vs. 2013.
(4) +10% growth over targets.
BRAND & SOCIAL OUTCOMES:
(1) The video of the experiment became the most shared video by a bank in 2014.
(2) The experiment’s video, used as a B2B marketing tool, generated partnerships with UAE’s leading schools including networks such as GEMS and Raffles.
(3) Student engagement programs, such as ‘Banker For A Day’ were launched by Emirates NBD.
(4) Children across schools participated in the experiment. And the idea became a part of curriculums and class projects, generating several “Hey Future Me…” videos.
(5) The idea travelled as parents shared “Hey Future Me…” messages across social media.
(6) “At HCT, we always follow a learning-by-doing approach in our classes to give our students a chance to apply what they learn in real life situations. Hey Future Me… was inspiring and helped facilitate that kind of environment. We used the video to introduce an in-class project for my level 2 students, inspired by the video.” (Higher Colleges of Technology, UAE)
(7) Winner of Gold Effie and Midas Awards.