Situation

With the rise of FinTech competitors, how could we show audiences that HSBC - the only original international bank - enables people to spend like a local, and ultimately give confidence and control to our customers so they can get on with what really matters?

Brief

With the launch of our new Global Money account, we required a creative strategy to help reclaim our territory on social as the go to bank for international spending overseas. We needed a way to humanise our brand and explain the benefits of the Global Money card in a conversational way with a real use case: holidays.

Objectives

The objective of our activity was to make HSBC UK’s international credentials relevant to our mass market audience in the UK.

Fees are considered the ‘dirty word’ in travel, but with an HSBC UK Global Money account, our OOH activity helped raise awareness you can drop the ’F word’ (fees) around the world; making it clear HSBC UK breaks down borders that get in the way of opportunity.

We set out to position Global Money as a ‘must-have addition’ to any journey abroad. We extended the billboard OOH concepts in social by working with a set of influencers to show how the Global Money account helped them enjoy unique experiences abroad.

Our influencers were briefed to create their own content, in their own style and for their own audiences, with some guidance to utilise social-first techniques like tapping the Global Money card on the camera as a transition to magically take the viewer to a foreign county.

Our campaign targeted 2 specific audience groups:

• HSBC UK customers on social media aged 18-54

• UK audiences with an interest in travel

Our social activity set out to show how HSBC UK are the original bank that enables customers to spend like a local. We wanted to raise awareness with our target audience that the bank has a Global Money account that can help them make the most of their money with no HSBC fees abroad, establishing HSBC Global Money as the go-to bank account for international transactions and HSBC fee-free spending.

The influencer content was designed to create FOMO and a sense of impetus with audiences that people are shifting to our product. We did this by showing that Global Money is a must have when travelling abroad and showcasing the ease of using the product, to help create advocacy with customers.

Influencers were briefed to create their own content, in their own style and for their own audiences, with guidance to utilise social-first techniques like tapping the Global Money card on the camera to transition, magically taking the viewer to a foreign county.

Keeping the brief non-prescriptive, we were able to steer the influencer collabs towards more relatable, accessible, and authentic content, crucially less advert-y and refreshingly un-corporate.

Our 4 chosen influencers ran a total of 4 x Instagram Reels and 12 x Instagram Stories collectively. The editorial narrative of each creator’s content was slightly different, helping to ensure each video fitted the creator’s own style e.g. packing in preparation for a holiday or enjoying the cards’ ease of the use whilst on a family holiday.

To increase brand recall, we worked collaboratively to ensure our Global Money card featured prominently within the first few seconds of content.

Overall, our influencer content reached over 11.8M unique users across Instagram.

As part of the campaign, we ran a multi-cell test to understand the performance of influencer content specifically. This testing and a very deliberate creative & media planning approach allowed us to measure the impact of Branded Content (via influencers) vs our business-as-usual campaign communications.

This test delivered 1.7pt message association uplift for "No Fees Overseas" exceeding Financial Services norms (1.2pts) and the BAU baseline (1.1pts).

Working with influencers who were already HSBC UK customers helped provide a greater level of authenticity of messaging as they were familiar with the brand. As a result, the campaign received critical acclaim by Marketing Week (https://www.marketingweek.com/hsbc-facebook-ad-outperforms-effectiveness/?cmpid=em~newsletter~breaking_news~n~n&utm_medium=em&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=breaking_news&eid=34570428&sid=MW0001&adg=10077270) as a top performer for advertising effectiveness on Meta by Insights by Kantar (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7122523749668540416/).