SPARKS, an industry-first online web-series, follows a group of young bankers navigating work and their personal lives. Inspired by true client stories, the web-series depicts how these bankers challenge the status quo and go above and beyond when solving unusual client challenges.
SPARKS started as an experiment in 2016 and has come to comprise three seasons and 24 episodes, with the most recent three new episodes launched in August 2023.
SPARKS allows us to humanise both bankers and banking across the region (SG, IN, ID, HK, TW, CN) thus creating an emotional connection that sustains the audience's interest in a category that otherwise sees largely product-centric communication.
Inspired by true events and client stories, we communicate the belief that there is more to banking than money – that if we can take the hassle out of banking, then our clients can focus on what's truly important to them.
Across SPARKS seasons, we strive to showcase DBS as a:
• leading sustainability champion and digital leader
• different kind of bank that enables customers to Live more, Bank less
• future-ready, progressive employer of choice and a great place to work
In particular, SPARKS Season 3 Episodes 3,4,5 (our award entry) casted a spotlight on local businesses-for-impact with innovative sustainability solutions, and sought to raise awareness and galvanise action around society’s key sustainability challenges. The episodes were inspired by actual renewable solutions and businesses DBS supported.
Content Strategy
Often times, news coverage of climate change related issues are dire and possibly demoralising (https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/24/climate-doomers-ipcc-un-report/). The topic itself is complex and hard to grasp.
We therefore wanted to tackle it differently for our SPARKS campaign via:
The overall content idea and execution of our campaign was to entertain and educate, making it easy for audiences to join us on this journey to being more sustainable.
Media Strategy & Execution
In order to capture attention and engage viewers, we leveraged a content strategy of Big Stories (Full Episodes of SPARKS, Behind the Spark) and Small Invitations (Trailers, Cutdowns, Fringe content) and deployed them across a broad media mix involving YouTube, Programmatic Video, and Social channels.
For our media strategy, we harnessed a two-pronged approach of Expand (mass awareness) and Entrench (optimized audience targeting).
Expand - Mass Awareness
To achieve awareness at scale, we leveraged a 7-day high impact presence via YouTube Masthead across 5 markets, reaching more than 68m people and driving a massive 136m impressions within the period.
Entrench - Optimized, Audience Targeting
We leveraged optimized targeting on YouTube TrueView In-stream and Programmatic Video to relevant audiences who we felt most likely to perform complete viewings of our content. By utilising advanced targeting options, we were able to set demographic filters, interests and affinity audiences to ensure that our campaign message was delivered to the highly relevant viewers. Some of our key targeting include:
Across all our 24 SPARKS episodes since inception, we ensured that our brand message reached our relevant audiences, achieving more than 1 billion video views and 60 million engagements across the APAC region, with more than 10% of business enquiries DBS received online influenced from SPARKS.
More specifically for SPARKS Season 3 Episodes 3,4,5 campaign (our award entry), we achieved:
Specifically on our key channel of YouTube, we achieved:
