Cost-Benefit Campaign

Background

Africa developed a positioning for Itaú based on the thought, ‘Itaú, made for you’. The challenge was to demonstrate that this was a real promise from the bank to each and every one of its existing and potential customers.

Idea

The idea was to prove that Itaú was really made for you by means of the largest personalised print-media initiative ever put together anywhere in the world. The agency inserted personalised ads into 1.2 million issues of the widest-circulated magazine in the country – Veja. It was an enormous challenge for both agency and publisher, Editora Abril, to pull this off. It meant studying all the data to find out who was an Itaú client and also a Veja subscriber; who was an Itaú Personalité client and who was an employee; who possessed only one checking account, etc.

Each one of them received at home a personal ad containing his/her name, emphasising the fact that the bank was actually ‘Made for you’. In addition to the personalised ads, Africa positioned the bank’s ‘best cost-benefit’ concept by developing a two-pointed pencil, where one point represented Itaú, and the other its clients, thus showing the perfect balance between the two points, where both are winners.

Results

At the end of 2008, the brand’s equity index had grown substantially, making Itaú the ‘top of mind’ brand in its category. The bank was also named the most admired bank in Brazil (Source: TNS Interscience) and the most valuable brand in Latin America (Source: Interbrand).

Our Thoughts

It was Einstein, I think, who remarked that if an idea doesn’t look completely mad then it probably isn’t any good. The person who had this idea must have been regarded as off his rocker. ‘Hey, guys, why don’t we hand-craft over a million ads. That’d be “made for you”, don’t you think?’ Maybe the execution could be sharper. But the base idea, that you can personalise a million separate pages in a million copies of one magazine is amazing.