ING: SPONSOR THINKING

Credits & Description:

Advertiser: ING DIRECT
Agency: SRA. RUSHMORE
Category: Best Use of Integrated Media
Advertising campaign: SPONSOR THINKING
Art Director: Jesus Morilla (Sra.Rushmore)
Executive Producer: Mario Fornies
Account Supervisor: Macarena Amiama (Sra.Rushmore)
Account Executive: Silvia Lopez (Sra.Rushmore)
Copy: Cesar Garcia (Sra.Rushmore)
Creative Director: Ezequiel Ruiz (Sra.Rushmore)
Account Director: Jorge Moscat (Sra.Rushmore)
Director: Zipi
Executive Creative Director: Cesar Garcia (Sra.Rushmore)

Strategy
It’s the end of 2012. The social and economic climate in Spain are very complex. There are constant negative references to financial institutions, corruption and bailouts. Banks’ reputations are at their lowest. In addition, the Christmas season has saturated the market with holiday messaging.How could ING Direct breakthrough in these circumstances?In the monotony of the day to day, the most obvious insight is “I am inundated with information. I never have time to reflect”It’s with this in mind that ING Direct launched their Brand Image campaign, using “nothing” in its most absolute form. We used our campaign assets to create blank, white spaces.To what end? In order to provide the consumer a moment of quiet in the middle of all the chaos surrounding him. Tranquility, silence, a time to think: a scarce commodity. To put value in the simple act of just stopping and thinking...

Effectiveness
The social blogosphere, Twitter in particular, was on fire. We received over 1,800 tweets such as “I think the ING Direct ad is the best I’ve seen in my life” and “the ING Direct ad is epic”. As one of our main success metrics was to generate some Brand love, the campaign was a huge succes.Unaided awareness for the Brand superseded previous campaigns by 27% and campaign awareness superseded previous campaigns by 25%.More importantly, though the campaign focused on Brand image, ING Direct increased its client base, beating the previous brand campaign by 13%.

Execution
We created the concept of “ING Direct sponsors thinking”, changing each ad to accomodate the format and context in which it would be seen (TV, Online, Radio, Out-of-Home and Newspaper).The campaign launched with a spot that left the country’s televisions with a blank orange screen for 40 long seconds. Twitter was on fire.The next day, we had switched out the usual ads in the city billboards and replaced them with huge white blank spaces. Similarly, blank spreads could be found in the country’s most prominent newspapers. The newspapers’ online homepages were taken over by blank digital banners. In addition, radio DJs went silent for a few seconds to provide moments of reflection for their listeners.