Objectives

Understanding India's shopping behavior 

With the 2020 pandemic, the pent up demand from the lockdown period was expected to be let out during the festive shopping season. A government survey revealed that 43% of Indians planned to spend more during the festive season. With a whopping 89% looking forward to sales & discounts and, 55% of people agreed to hold up their purchases in anticipation of festive deals and offers. 

Our objective was to make sure that HDFC Bank Cards were the ones they used to shop this festive season. 

When every other brand was promoting offers to ensure festive sales, we made an even better deal to make consumers save more money, through HDFC Festive Treats. Discounts and cashback on purchases made by an HDFC Bank Card user, over and above what the brand was offering. 

How to stand apart from the rest? 

With each brand heavily investing in advertisements to promote their ongoing sales and promotions, the entire market felt cluttered and monotonous. Even other banks had their own campaigns underway to tap this enormous festive business. So no matter how great our deal was, we would still need some standing out, to ensure top of the head recall when the time came to make the purchase.

Strategy and Execution

Ambush is old school

In recent times influencers have played a vital role in forming key consumer purchase decisions. But during this festive season, with brands heavily promoting their discount offers through influencer collaborations, we saw a unique opportunity to not ambush these brand promotions, but instead piggyback on these ads, and voila, we conceptualized Add an Ad.

To every brand ad, we simply 'Add An Ad'

When an influencer would post a brand promotion story, it would be immediately followed by the influencer saying: 

“Liked what you saw in my previous story? Shop right now with your HDFC Bank Debit/Credit cards to save more on your shopping! So swipe up and make all your dreams come true with HDFC Bank Festive Treats!”.

Our communication was simple - Buy from the many brands that are offering discounts and offers, but pay using an HDFC Bank card to avail additional cashback on all your purchases. 

Repurposing Instagram’s most used ‘Story’ feature for a seamless & non-intrusive Ad

The sequencing of our ad immediately after the many influencers' Instagram stories that were already promoting other branded offers, ensured that at that particular moment of exposure:

• The ad became hyper contextual as the messaging had a high relevance for the viewer,
• communication was seamless, which ensured higher retention rates, 
• and when done at scale across categories, it strengthened the recall factor
• Providing a swipe up purchase link was our way of striking while the iron was hot.

EXECUTION

We knew from a social media perspective, Instagram would be highly critical given the high affinity with our target audience, and here, we could get maximum actionable traction using Instagram stories and the swipe up feature. 

The masterstroke of creativity for us was to be able to leverage an existing feature of the platform in a totally different way, without any new tech hacks, giving us the bandwidth to use our monetary resources wisely towards reaching more audiences, across Indian geographies. 

We thus selected influencers with diverse followings and also took note of which brands they were collaborating with during the festive season. This allowed us to identify the influencers across key categories, viz. Tech, fashion, travel, consumer durables, etc. where our offer would be relevant. 

The brand was already putting in the effort of selling their product, we only had to make sure the sale happened through an HDFC Bank card. We clearly communicated, immediately following the brand promoted story, the gratification for the consumer of getting an even better deal on top of the existing brand offer. Providing a swipe up purchase link was our way of striking while the iron was hot. 

Compared to other channels, the mobile amplification of Festive Treats, through AddAnAd made it possible for us to have a seamless advertisement, that was hyper contextual and highly relevant to the user at that very moment in time. The strategic placement of our ads strengthened our recall factor, making HDFC Bank cards synonymous with festive shopping to earn better deals.

Results

We collaborated with 75+ social media influencers promoting a Festive Treats ad on Instagram immediately after a relevant product promotion. Without ambushing any brand, we added our Festive Treats Ad to over 80+ brand promotions. 

• 102K Swipe Ups from Insta stories to make purchases 
• 107% increase in website traffic 
• Reach of 24 Million+ and an engagement of 2.2 Million+ 
• 25% Increase in card spends for HDFC Bank during the campaign period 
• 13% increase in Brand awareness and 11% increase in consideration post the campaign period. 

The increase in business and brand awareness of HDFC Bank during Festive Treats is a testament to the effectiveness of Add An AD.

Media