Meridian – Skip

Meridian

In its efforts to differentiate from the Big 5 banks in Canada and attract new Members, Meridian had to innovate and do something truly different. SWEEP, a first of its kind in Canada; makes sure deposits earn as much as possible in a high interest savings account by monitoring both chequing and saving activity and reconciling balances automatically every night. The problem though, with a comparatively low budget and low Unaided and Top of Mind awareness scores, how could we get anyone to even notice our message, let alone understand the benefits of SWEEP. To meet this challenge, we knew we had to outsmart versus outspend. To parallel the innovative nature of SWEEP and the brand’s approachable, friendly tone, we wanted our messaging to be delivered in an equally innovative, yet feel good way. The solution was video pre-roll, the innovation was to creatively leverage the ‘skip’ button to provide a unique user experience. The user experience was surprisingly simple and was a true fusion of creative with digital behaviour. At first exposure, consumers saw a typical pre-roll video with our actor walking on screen. However, when the ‘skip’ button appeared and was clicked, instead of skipping the ad the actor’s actions changed from walking to skipping. The innovation engaged the user in real-time and extended the experience in an unexpected way, thus providing the brand more opportunity to get the message across and be memorable. Our ‘Skippable” ad over-delivered against our estimated impressions and delivered a +500% CTR when compared to a traditional display execution.