Bank Direct Home Mortgage

Background

Vote for your favourite NZ Idol...then check the latest home loan rates.

Direct response television used to be about advertising your product in a 90 second commercial and having a call centre waiting to take orders.

But what if the product you want to sell is a home loan? And what if you, know your prospects are appointment viewers who'll be in front of their TV sets between 6pm and 9pm on a Sunday evening? Will they order your product then? Does anyone leap up off their sofa in the middle of their favourite programme and secure a new home loan? More likely they'll think: 'I'll do that in the morning'. But the risk then is that they forget, or that other things take priority.

So when BankDirect's media agency, Spark, suggested to Big Communications that driving TV response via txt they jumped at the idea.

Target Audience

Consumers looking for their first home loan or to renew an existing one.

Channels

Media components:

• TV Advertising

Touchpoint implemented the following components of the campaign:

• Mobile Txt Response

Approach

Big wrote a home loan ad in which BankDirect said (or rather Roland Gift said): 'If you're interested but don't want to talk now, just txt us and we'll call you tomorrow'.

The campaign uses txt in another very simple way too. Home loan rates can sometimes move up or down on a weekly basis as banks jostle to match or undercut their competitors' rates. Having a TV ad ready for each new rate isn't always practical. So in another commercial Roland invites you to txt the word 'rates' to 3003 to get BankDirect's home loan rates sent directly to your mobile.

How Touchpoint Technology Helped

• Automating the Txt response for the consumer.
• Providing an simple interface for Bank Direct staff to update daily rates.

Results

It's tempting sometimes to try and shoehorn a communication problem into a txt solution just to claim participation in the txt space. Here however, txt has played a natural and vital role in making BankDirect's television advertising more effective. It has made the first interaction with BankDirect an easy one and has also helped to enhance BankDirect's reputation as a bank that delivers smart, simple solutions.