How do you drive mortgage applications during an economic downturn? You overcome negativity: stop focusing on rates and prioritise happiness.

In Russia, it’s good luck for a cat to be first to cross the threshold of your new home. So we made a brilliantly PRable offer - for every new mortgage deal we’ll loan you a real life cat for your housewarming party.

Then we made sure that everyone had a chance to enjoy the fun, promoting our idea with advertising, a cat-selection microsite, videos, social content and fleet of branded vans.

Worldwide coverage in 580 different media resulted in 500,000 site visitors, 1,000,000 video views and meant that Sberbank mortgage volumes grew by 70%. Purrrfect!

To create a buzz around the campaign, we created a quiz for prospective homebuyers, which asked “What kind of cat are you?” and allowed participants to share the results on all social networks.

The campaign fused online and offline activity, with a microsite where homebuyers could browse and select which cat they would like to borrow, a YouTube video advertising the cat rental service and a fleet of branded vans used to transport the cats.

The final results were purrrfect: the microsite received over half a million visitors the mortgage website; the Youtube video enjoyed more than a million views and the Get Lucky campaign received huge PR coverage with 580 mentions around the world.

But best of all, when its mortgage volumes grew by 70%, Sberbank felt like the cat that got the cream.