Both our banking apps Launchpad and Barclays Mobile Banking had only static imagery at the login and registration page. This was driven primarily from functional ease rather than a creative driver. Our creative in house and design studios wanted to push the boundaries further and sought to craft something beautiful and engaging that gave us total art direction and creative control. By using our brand guidelines and ethos of 'let's go forward' the question that we challenged ourselves with was how could we visualize this on screen. Banking and financial transactions sadly are coupled with stressful emotions, money worries and making sure our long-term dreams are fulfilled pre establish a tension with any banking or financial relationship. We wanted to take the edge off this and create soothing beautiful content that would guide you into the world of your finances. We also know that more and more of our customers are taking control of their finances through a 'mobile first' approach, commuter rush hour overground trains could arguably constitute the biggest moving mobile branches to date. How could we creatively reflect our mobile first banking from anywhere in Britain and connect this to our brand guidelines in a beautifully curated way? The brief was to create a series of short (10 - 30 second) bespoke portrait format film sequences that depict 'Britain' and 'let's go forward'. The 'Britain' element was part of a wider phase 2 plan that would geo-locate our customers and feed them specific geo location content that differed with the seasons.

Our creative idea was to merge the freedom to bank anywhere with the landscape and the forward motion in symmetry for brand ethos and order. We looked at our rivals and the content they were putting into the work they had and also film trailers. How does the director entice, engage and woo the viewer into their world? Also we know that our function is very different from a linear story narrative, we want our customers to interact and to plan their finances from the convenience of their home or anywhere they pleased. We looked at how we could connect the beautiful and diverse landscape of Britain and intellectually mirror this into the footage. Context and examples looked at where tourist videos from around Britain and also a lot of Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson films. Mobile portrait video formats and Instagram story videos being now part of our digital social fabric meant we wanted to build on this new familiarity and take it to the next level. How could we bring cinematic finishes, lenses, rigs, drones, grading etc. into the portrait palm of ones hands? We know from our customer insight that banking can be stressful, so these had to be beautiful shots that soothed the customer as much as possible.More and more of our millions of customers are using the app as the primary way of controlling their finances, embedding the control they have.

We have insight into when and how long our customers log into the app. The execution of having video embedded inside the app means that we can create short but high quality content for our increasingly discerning customers and make them feel that we are on this journey together in a relationship not just as their bank

Being the in house creative and production agency we straddle both sides of the advertising divide. We knew that our first challenge was to get internal stakeholder buy in, this contextualised within a company that has conservative brand values was no easy task. We also had to make sure our accessibility and compliance teams were happy. Visually impaired customers would only be able to work with certain colours and contrasts and these customers must absolutely be catered for. How to balance this with quite specific brand and our own creative thoughts with the art direction began to define our production strategy. Contrast between sky and land, different weather conditions and how much post production could we fit into the production timelines began to derive our production logistics outlook

We partnered with one of our external production companies and worked with them on pre-production to maximize the number of locations we could film in that would offer this diversity of tone, colour, texture and depth of field in camera. We planned around weather and filming permits and even ran into problems with a ski lift and dirt track in Glencoe. All in all locations shot in were London, Hasting, Liverpool, Glasgow, Antrim and the surrounding areas. Timeline of production was 9 months from start to finish

Our initial launch was to 40 thousand customers in Launchpad and since then it has been rolled out to the app store where anyone Barclays or not van download the app to connect their bank accounts thank to open bnking. At the time of print we have over 6.5 million active users who are gracefully carried over beautiful British landscapes whilst enabled to their banking from anywhere that has phone signal.