American Express: WELCOME TO SMALL BUSINESS SATURDAY

Credits & Description:

Advertiser: AMERICAN EXPRESS
Agency: DIGITAS
Category: Financial Products & Servcies
Advertising campaign: WELCOME TO SMALL BUSINESS SATURDAY


Relevancy
We wanted to provide an incentive to activate to consumers support their local small businesses. But because the main focus was on the SBOs taking ownership of SBS, we designed a toolkit that could be leveraged in countless ways. A similar toolkit was leveraged for community supporters.Many SBOs may not know the best way to advertise online—or be able to afford it. So we created the online ad tool to give them just that—free online ads locally placed with premium publishers.

Outcome
The Small Business Saturday Facebook page reached over 3.2 million “Likes” in 2012, and consumer awareness of the day skyrocketed to 74%. The increased awareness translated into higher spending. Those US consumers who were aware of SBS spent a total of $5.5 billion with independent merchants.Over 100,000 business owners took advantage of the tools on ShopSmall.com. And over 720,000 businesses had installed permanent POP placements encouraging customers to Shop Small. From the free hyper-local ad tool, we served over 47 million local impressions on behalf of 26,000 small businesses across the country.

Implementation
For shoppers, we created an interactive map of qualifying merchants in their area and gave $25 statement credits to Cardmembers who shopped at these merchants on Small Business Saturday. Business owners could download a turnkey toolkit and customized in-store signage, read success stories from other SBOs. And most innovative of all, SBOs could use an online ad tool to easily customize free, hyper-local, online display ads. Community supporters were able to share and promote the day through multiple social media platforms and resources from a downloadable toolkit.

Client Brief Or Objective
During the holiday season, small businesses can be overlooked by shoppers as large, national retailers often get the attention. In 2010, American Express created Small Business Saturday® (SBS). It’s an official shopping day between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, to help fulfill American Express OPEN®’s mission: helping small businesses do more business. The 2012 SBS objective was to empower small business owners (SBOs) to make the day their own and encourage others to support their local communities. As a financial institution, American Express is uniquely positioned to advocate for shopping small because of their duel relationship with consumers and SBOs.