ING is one of the main sponsors of the Dutch Rijksmuseum. However, the museum has been closed for ten years, and nobody really knows about their sponsorship. Now the museum is reopening, ING wants to claim its sponsorship. Since most banks have a debatable reputation (with ING being no exception), this needed to be done sympathetically.

So we needed to step away from 'expensive' traditional media, and do something that would surprise people, that would actually contribute something nice, and would hopefully tilt the skeptical public opinion about the bank.

The idea was simple; After a long decade, the famous works of the Rijkmuseum are back. So we took the most famous painting of all, Rembrandt's Night Watch, and let it 'return.'

We timed the launch of our film so that news media could make it accompany actual news about the opening of the museum, about two weeks in before it. We seeded the film, but again stayed away from obviously paid media.

It then spread rapidly. News shows from all over the world picked it up. People spoke lovingly about the bank and their stunt in over 100.000 tweets and comments. Established media also complimented ING on the piece; The Huffington Post called it 'a wave of epic brilliance,' and their 'favorite flash mob ever.' Within a week, more than 10.000.000 people saw our film, from Argentina to Russia, and learned about ING's sponsorship of the Rijksmuseum.

We focussed two pillars:

1) News media. In the context of the opening of the Rijksmuseum, this piece could travel into newspapers and news shows.

2) Online spread. We made a deliberate choice not to use obvious paid media (like pre-rolls for instance), so it would hold its sympathetic character. We gave the film a little push online, seeding it on several Dutch media. When the international potential became apparent, we manually dropped it into countries that didn't pay attention to it yet.

The first day it spread fast online. National newspapers featured the stunt on the front page. The next day it went abroad. Prime time news shows aired the piece in its entirety; Spain, Japan, France, Germany, Belgium, Russia and more. CNN played it every hour for a day. More than 10m people saw the piece, and more than 100,000 commented or tweeted about it enthusiastically. Now everyone knew about the reopening Rijksmuseum and ING's sponsorship.