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New Zealand Bank Advertises on Notes
 | By Kerry Rodgers
October 16, 2007 |
Since 1992, living legend and Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hilary, or plain Ed to his friends, has been featured on the face of New Zealand's $5 note (Standard Catalog of World Paper Money No. P-177, 186). Late last year New Zealand's ASB Bank turned this note image into an advertising medium to launch a new banking technology called "pago" (pay & go).
Essentially, pago lets customers use mobile phones to pay for services while on the move. Friends set up digital/virtual wallets, linked to their everyday bank accounts. They can then text cash to one another or to pago-linked businesses.
The use of Hilary's image by the bank's media and creative agents, OMD and TBWA\Whybin, was highly innovative. It may have been a world first. In most countries the circulating national currency is sacrosanct. However, the Kiwi advertisers managed to persuade New Zealand's central bank that what they intended would not impede the normal use of the notes nor put the currency at risk in any way, shape or form.
The campaign was two-pronged.
First, the bank placed peelable stickers showing highly pixilated images of Sir Ed over his regular portrait on 5,000 $5 bank notes. They seeded these stickered notes into circulation. When any curious member of the public peeled off a sticker, they found a message on its back promoting pago and directing them to the Web site, www.pago.co.nz.
Following the main launch in December 2006, a further 5,000 notes were stickered and issued in early 2007.
Second, the bank's agency had New Zealand artist Maurice Bennett create a highly pixilated 3D version of the entire $5 note. It was fashioned from 1,250 books of appropriately-colored Post-It notes, totaling 30,000 individual stickers, each of which promoted pago and the new technology's Web address.
The sculpture was displayed at Auckland's central Britomart train station, allowing commuters to tear off a Post-It sticker as they walked by. The art installation was decimated within a week. But, by then 30,000 travelers and their numerous friends knew all about pago.
The promotion was completed by turning bus stop shelters into Hypertag/ Bluetooth terminals that dispensed digital pago money credit to the curious, via infra-red relays to cell phones.
The target audience for the campaign was the highly mobile "Digital Natives," today's tech-savvy youth audience who tend to be highly cynical of conventional marketing messages - and are seldom at home. The strategy was to use money to capture their attention.
And pixilating Sir Ed proved effective. Well over a thousand of Auckland's Digital Natives had signed up for the new service in the first few days.
Not only was the campaign highly successful, but its originality and innovation was recognized by the world's top advertising, creative, direct marketing, interactive, film, radio, media, sales promotion and marketing gurus at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival (IAF) in June. They awarded the ASB Bank a Grand Prix in the "Financial Products & Services" category; a Bronze Media Lion in the "Best Use of Ambient Media: Small Scale" category; another Bronze Media Lion in the "Use of Mixed Media" category; a Bronze Direct Lion in the "Alternative Media" category for the pago Money Sticker; and a Promo Lion in the "Best Integrated Promotional Campaign" category.
Regrettably, the New Zealand note authorities have declined any comment on the campaign or the Cannes awards.
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