Our concept was simple: give people a reason to care about the pennies they take for granted and they might start saving them. And that might get them to care about interest rates, mortgages, and cash-back credit cards, too.

So we created The Ally Lucky Penny, an ordinary-looking cent worth an extraordinary $1,000. Without warning or fanfare, we minted 100 Lucky Pennies, coded each one, and spread them across 10 US cities, in all the places people tend to ignore small change: on busy city sidewalks and subway platforms, near landmarks and in parks, outside arenas, and more.

We used PR, social media, influencers, and paid media to let the country know these Lucky Pennies were out there. And the hunt was on.

This integrated program utilized earned, owned, paid and experiential tactics to bring the concept to life. We used:

• Guerrilla Marketing

o Real-world placement of 100 pennies, 10 in each market, in New York, NY, Washington, DC, Charlotte, NC, Miami, FL, Detroit, MI, Chicago, IL, Denver, CO, Austin, TX, Los Angeles CA, San Diego, CA, in places ranging from tourist locations to random street corners

• Film:

o Social experiment video content to see how many people would walk by a penny on the busiest street in New York City. The video was used in an aggressive social media campaign on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Snapchat.

• OOH Media with digital retargeting

• Video and still photography of penny placement used as clues on Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat

• Influencer partnerships:

o A Jimmy Kimmel Live! Integration

o ESPN mini-mercials featuring Kenny Mayne

• A microsite with weekly clues

• New York Times FlexFrame

We not only exceeded our goal of driving awareness of the brand, but drove remarkable business results: The 350+MM PR & marketing impressions helped drive an increase to 57% awareness, the highest in Ally history. The epic reach of Lucky Penny also aided in Ally crushing their deposits goal of $9.5 billion by reaching $11 billion and reaching 212K new customers surpassing the full-year goal of 200K.

Some of the more specific measurements that lead to the above are below:

• 1.1MM+ visits to the program’s microsite

• 1,239+ media clips leading to 215MM+ PR impressions

• 81.55MM+ paid media impressions

• 21MM+ OOH digital media impressions driving 62.5K consumer clicks

• Increased social media mentions of Ally by 6x (leading to Ally trending on Facebook for the first time)

• Increased Ally’s social follower count by 32% on Twitter