The Lloyds Bank brand is salient, with a heritage that spans over 250 years and awareness levels that exceed 90% across UK adult demographics.

A key marketing focus is retaining its highest value customers. One of Lloyds' most valuable segments is financially sophisticated older customers with high-value assets.

Lloyds want all of their customers to feel control of their money, and they have a market leading app which helps people do just that. The app has many innovative features that save time, give peace of mind and make financial admin effortless.

In spite of this, older customers were not using the app as much as other groups, and so our challenge was to find a way to get this group of upwardly mobile, intellectual customers to download and use the app.

Next, behavioural economics was applied. Advertising often appeals to instinctive decision making – System 1 thinking (see Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow). Instead, the app features would be revealed in clues that the astute older readers would solve using deliberate System 2 thinking.

The print formats would run in the Daily Telegraph – the perfect context to attract our older audience – with their editorial team helping us craft the clues for the crossword puzzles.

In an unconventional partnership approach, the Daily Telegraph not only provided the contextual environment, their editorial team also wrote the clues for the advertising space. We created ten different ads, each one communicating a different app feature, that were displayed as clues in half page formats.

The answers ran within editorial space on the same day, and included directions on where to find out more about the features.

5 times more effective than any other app campaign

The ads garnered a strong positive response, with 65% of Telegraph readers agreeing the creative was 'informative, grabbed their attention and clever'.

The majority of readers acted after seeing the ads: 56% visited the Lloyds Bank website, 51% learned more about the app features, and 44% downloaded or used the app. No Lloyds Bank 'app features' campaign had ever come close to double digits for trial numbers.

Lessons learned:

1. Appealing to the target audience's intellect instead of infantilising it worked – 44% downloaded and used the app.

2. Appearing on a news brand's crossword page put Lloyds in a context that was read almost exclusively read by its segment, and that had high dwell time.

3. Presenting a familiar 'System 2' challenge to this older, more sophisticated segment was three times more effective at nudging them towards a completely new