2017 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

To build wealth in life, you need to save for the long-term and regularly. But looking 10, 20 and even 30 years into the future is hard ask for most people – especially given our need for instant gratification. We knew this needed to begin and end with education – but to forget that we were talking about a bank to ensure that we engaged with people. With a key insight that people trust those who have been through something before, for example a life-experience, and with trust an important factor with money, we needed to connect HSBC’s profile and people who had stories to share. So, we built an integrated content campaign around a hub on its website called ‘Life Matters’ that showcased a video series called ‘Perspectives’ that integrated video, the first financial podcast in the middle east, infographics, images, social content to educate our audience on wealth.

Creative Execution

The digital content series comprised primarily of videos made for social media with supporting content such as podcasts, infographics, social posts and articles to enable the audience to dive deeper into the topics. The Life Matters portal on HSBC’s UAE website housed the content. This helped the user on their journey from ad, or social media, through to understanding more about the complex topics of wealth management. Videos were edited to cater to the target segments and a variety of platform-specific content pieces were created. Content rolled out over a 6-month period, with 58 pieces of content, across HSBC’s platforms and on social media, with a supporting media strategy. The audience segmentation into expat groups, interests and gender (for example, former international Rugby player Stephen Thompson was targeted at men, who were 35+) to allow us to place spend on the right platforms using a variety of our assets.

With an organic and paid strategy that involved advanced audience segmentation techniques and channel planning we achieved: • 5.5mn impressions in newsfeeds, websites and video players across the UAE; • An impressive total of 3.4mn expats seeing our videos and engaging with them across Facebook, YouTube and custom sites – BBC World, Forbes and many others. • This achieved a YouTube view rate of 15% above Google’s benchmarks and an engagement rate of above 3%, well over double the benchmarks. As a campaign without sales objectives and therefore no sales-related CTA or overt brand/product information, the strength of the content was still able to generate leads for the bank. These results have meant that HSBC is well on its way to presenting itself as a thought-leader in wealth management in the UAE, further solidifying HSBC’s strength in the market.

We knew that awareness of financial management products and services in general is lacking in the market. Following a review of the data and HSBC own studies, we also knew that people perceived that they didn’t need to start long-term saving plans because it was too early, too difficult or just something they didn’t need to think of. Coupled with this knowledge, expats generally are not long-term thinkers – instead focused on the next 2 years in most cases. A long-term strategy was developed aimed at shifting perceptions about wealth management and facilitate positive conversations online. Utilising these insights, we built audience profiles and matched successful expats in the UAE to those profiles, filming their stories that could relate to the audience. We found that our audience was mostly on social, but also well-read. A supporting media plan was created to reach them via video across multiple platforms (social, non-social).