Honesty should not go unrewarded
NAB
Issue 25 | December 2012
Agency
Clemenger BBDO Melbourne
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Ant Keogh Creative Directors: Rohan Lancaster, Darren Pitt, Julian Schreiber, Tom Martin Senior Creatives: Ben Keenan, Quenton Miller
Production Team
Senior Agency Producer: Karolina Bozajkovska Executive Interactive Producer: Sasha Cunningham Interactive Producer: Terry Mann Print Producer: Ben Nash Production Company: Will O’Rourke Direction: The Glue Society (Matt Devine) Producer: Ian Iveson Head of Projects: Josh Mullens Executive Producer: Michael Ritchie Post Production: The Editors/Digital Pictures Sound: Flagstaff
Other Credits
Account Management Team: Simon Lamplough, Patrice Bougoin, Belinda Danks, Kyle Abshoff Planner: Heather Lewis
Date
June 2012
Background
For two years, NAB had been championing fairer banking for Australians. In fact NAB was the only bank to centre their whole business around giving their customers a better deal.
Idea
NAB had created a distance between itself and the other banks with its ‘Break Up’ campaign. It wanted to maintain that gap and planned a series of campaigns across 2012.
In 2011, the bank had run an idea for its credit cards business called ‘The Honesty Experiments’. The idea was to follow up from that with ‘Honesty shouldn’t go unrewarded.’
Proving that the citizens of Victoria, Australia, were an honest lot, the viral was shot candid-camera style in a shopping centre in Melbourne.
Everyday shoppers were placed in situations where they could either walk off with something valuable, or take the honest route and hand it in.
When people did the right thing, all the electronic boards and poster sites in the building suddenly showed their image, congratulating them for their honesty.
NAB’s General Manager Consumer Marketing, Andrew Wynne, was reported as saying that in the real world, often the only reward anyone receives for honesty is the knowledge that they have done the right thing.
“But what if, for a moment, we created a world where a simple honest act generated a massive outpouring of public praise and attention? We thought honest Australians deserved exactly that," he said.
Results
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Our Thoughts
In most relationships there is explicit communication and implicit.
If I tell my wife I love her, she smiles. If I buy her a diamond, she cries. The implicit message is often more powerful.
Here’s NAB not talking about interest rates and APR but talking about attitudes to money in a typically Aussie way. It’s a bit of a wind-up and some of the individuals celebrated for their honesty may have been uncomfortable with it but this is not traditional advertising, interrupting an experience. It is creating an experience.
It’s a brand enjoying a bit of banter with its customers. Don’t you think that’s remarkable? I do. Partly because so few brands behave like this, mostly because banks never do.