Going Long with a Shorty Winner: TD Bank

In the five years since I first wrote about The Shorty Awards, social media has evolved from a quirky playground for the adventurous to a disciplined practice for any serious marketer.  This change is evident both in terms of the size of the brands competing for the awards as well as the quality of the applications.  The case in point for this post is TD Bank’s #ThankYou campaign which won Best Financial Services campaign. While I encourage students of social media to read this case and the others in their entirety, here’s a quick overview of the campaign:

• In order to thank its customers, TD Bank turned 4 ATMs into Automated Thank you Machines and used a hidden camera to capture the surprising interactions. TD Bank took it one step further by actually delivering various Thank You’s like sending a family to Disneyland or reuniting a mother and her daughter. These engagements were turned into a 4-minute video that ultimately garnered over 32 million views and hundreds of thousands of shares across various social channels.  According to their Shorty application, “Analysis of all comments related to the campaign indicates that we also achieved our qualitative objective of improving perceptions of TD as the most customer-centric bank. In fact, an independent Google study yields estimates that 3.6 million Canadians or approximately 10% of the Country’s population claimed the video positively changed their brand impression while an additional 1.4 million Canadians said watching the video already reinforced their positive image of TD.”

To gain a greater understanding of how this campaign came into being and why it was so effective, I interviewed Chris Stamper, Senior Vice President, Corporate Marketing, TD Canada Trust. I have no doubt that you’ll find her comments instructive particularly in the advantages of customer centricity, an area that never seems to fail marketers.  As Arnott puts it, “The real ROI was finding a unique, authentic way to thank our customers.”

Drew: Where did the insight for this campaign come from?  

It’s as simple as wanting to say thank you. We say thank you to our customers every day, and we’ll say thank you tomorrow and the next day, but this was a coordinated effort to shout it from the rooftops. And, it was more than just thank you, it was thanks for your business, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing if it wasn’t for you. That’s what we were trying to get across to our customers in a personalized and heartfelt way.

Drew: What gave you confidence that this approach would actually work?

We hoped it was going to be successful but we really didn’t know – and it was beyond even our highest expectations. If at the end of the day we took 100 customers and gave them an experience of their lives that would have been enough for us. And regardless of what happened afterwards, we knew we were going to deliver that. We’re a brand that really connects with our customers — they are at the center of everything we do. We don’t believe that any bank or brand could have created this. We know our customers really well – it’s our local branch staff and the relationships they have with our customers that gave us the insights to these incredible stories.  

Drew: Your Shorty application credits employee amplification as an important catalyst.  Can you describe how the program was introduced to employees and if you worked with tool like Dynamic Signal to help manage and track the program?

Every year tens of thousands of our employees participate in customer appreciation day.  As part of our thank you in 2014, we simultaneously surprised customers who were standing in our over 1100 branches across Canada with a #TDThanksYou envelope containing a small cash gift, as a gesture of our appreciation. Customers who were on the phone with us and banking with us online at this time, also received this special surprise with a direct deposit in their account. Another thing to keep in mind is that we found the customers featured in the videos through our local branch employees who know their customers really well and often have close relationships with them. Think of Mike in Pickering who got to meet his baseball idol and throw the first pitch at a Major League Baseball game. Employees were genuinely proud of the video and keen to share it online.

Drew: Your Shorty application offers many measurable outcomes.  Which are you the proudest of and why?

The views are great but what it really comes down to is making an authentic connection with your customers – we’re so glad we could do that. Dorothy seeing her daughter in Trinidad, Christine taking her family to Disney Land and Mike throwing out the first pitch – that’s what we’re proudest of.

Drew: Working with real consumers is tricky since you never know what will happen.  Were there any surprises, good or bad, and how did that impact the program?

It’s true that you never know what kind of reaction you’ll get – especially when you’re going for an authentic reaction. Thank you means a lot of different things to different people, but I think we can all agree that it feels good to be appreciated, and that’s what this campaign was all about. At the end of the day people saw that these were genuine reactions. 

Drew:  This program had such a great impact in a short period of time — has it been extended or is there talk of a round two?  

We’re thrilled with the response – views continue to grow past 20MM – thanking our customers is something we will continue to do and that means finding ways to surprise and wow our customers. 

Drew: In your Shorty application, you talk about suspending typical ROI metrics.  How important was this to getting the idea approved and as you look at the results, can you make a compelling case that the program did have a material impact on customer loyalty?

The real ROI was finding a unique, authentic way to thank our customers. We’ve built our reputation on legendary customer service so this initiative was about more than marketing. It was about creating an experience and expressing to our customers how grateful we are that they continue to bank with us. When you put it this way, it’s less about the dollars and more about the experience of saying thank you in a big way.

Drew: If another brand were to attempt a program that involved “random acts of kindness,” what would you advice would you give them? (This question was answered by David Diamond of Diamond Marketing, the agency that created this campaign for TD Bank.)

David Diamond: The most important thing to remember when doing real world activation is that you are working with real people. There are no actors, no scripting, and no re-do’s. People are pretty astute and know when something is up. The second they think the situation around them isn’t right or they don’t feel comfortable you won’t get the reactions you’re looking for – and that will come through in the final product. Unlike commercials you need to let the situation unfold as organically as possible – there is no waiting for a magic hour, no perfect lighting, no perfect sound. You just got to keep the camera’s rolling and trust the process!

Self-serving note: Renegade is looking forward to this year’s Shorty Awards as our work with Leo Burnett on behalf of the NCAA was recognized as best Twitter campaign.