While producing this campaign, including the branded content that played the central role, we did not meet any restriction or regulations that could impose any limitations. The Netherlands is pretty much a free country…;)

To grab people’s attention we launched a lean, but hard to miss mass-media campaign. In a TV commercial we put the popular ‘boiling frog myth’ to test. We showed that this metaphor, which suggests that humans are too passive to change our economy, is actually untrue. As you can imagine, the tiny frog caused quite a stir and raised much curiosity about the 5 things website. The integrated campaign consisted of a second spot, online and social ads, all fueling the conversation and promoting our central content platform ‘5things.org’.

The target of 50.000 unique website visitors during campaign period was quickly reached and exceeded 100.000. (Mind you the Dutch population of ‘cultural creatives’ -our primary target audience- is relatively small.) But the quality of the impact was actually more important to us than the sheer quantity. We wanted people to spend time with our content, which happened: users spent 3 minutes on average on the site. Brand awareness results of the campaign were also stronger than expected. Spontaneous TOM went from 25% to 28%, aided TOM from 67% to 74%. During the campaign period funds were raised for the investment products of the bank, which royally exceeded the target (35 million) by 60% with 56 million. Furthermore, the content quickly became a talking point, heavily liked, shared and commented on social media (25.000 times, creating a reach of 3 million people), spreading new perspectives on the economy. Which is exactly what we wanted to accomplish.