It’s the end of 2012. The social and economic climate in Spain are very complex. There are constant negative references to financial institutions, corruption and bailouts. Banks’ reputations are at their lowest. In addition, the Christmas season has saturated the market with holiday messaging.

It’s at this time that ING Direct launched their Brand Image campaign, using “nothing” in its most absolute form. We used our campaign assets to create blank, white spaces.

To what end? In order to provide the consumer a moment of quiet in the middle of all the chaos surrounding him. Tranquility, silence, a time to think: a scarce commodity. To put value in the simple act of just stopping and thinking...which is exactly the reason why one chooses to sign up with ING Direct.

We created the concept of “ING Direct sponsors thinking”, changing each ad to accomodate the format and context in which it would be seen (TV, Online, Radio, Out-of-Home and Newspaper).

The campaign launched with a spot that left the country’s televisions with a blank orange screen for 40 long seconds. Twitter was on fire.

The next day, we had switched out the usual ads in the city billboards and replaced them with huge white blank spaces. Similarly, blank spreads could be found in the country’s most prominent newspapers. The newspapers’ online homepages were taken over by blank digital banners. In addition, radio DJs went silent for a few seconds to provide moments of reflection for their listeners.

The social blogosphere, Twitter in particular, was on fire. We received over 1,800 tweets stating things like “I’m a big fan of the ING ads” , “I think the ING Direct ad is the best I’ve seen in my life” and “the ING Direct ad is epic”. Knowing that one of our main success metrics was to generate some Brand love, our campaign was a huge succes.

Unaided awareness for the Brand increased by 27% from the last Brand campaign, as well as the campaign awareness superseded previous campaigns by 25%.

More importantly, while the campaign was focused on redefining the Brand image, ING Direct increased its client base, going beyond the previous Brand campaign by 13%.