October 16, 2007
New Zealand Bank Advertises Mobile Service on Notes
Since 1992, living legend and Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hilary, or plain Ed to his friends, has been featured on the face of New Zealand's $5 note.
Late last year New Zealand's ASB Bank turned this note image into an advertising medium to launch a new banking technology called "pago" (pay & go).
Essentially, pago lets customers use mobile phones to pay for services while on the move. Friends set up digital/virtual wallets, linked to their everyday bank accounts. They can then text cash to one another or to pago-linked businesses.
To launch the service, they offered the following campaign:
First, the bank placed peelable stickers showing highly pixilated images of Sir Ed over his regular portrait on 5,000 $5 bank notes. They seeded these stickered notes into circulation. When any curious member of the public peeled off a sticker, they found a message on its back promoting pago and directing them to the Web site, www.pago.co.nz.
Second, the bank's agency had New Zealand artist Maurice Bennett create a highly pixilated 3D version of the entire $5 note. It was fashioned from 1,250 books of appropriately-colored Post-It notes, totaling 30,000 individual stickers, each of which promoted pago and the new technology's Web address.
The target audience for the campaign was the highly mobile "Digital Natives," today's tech-savvy youth audience who tend to be highly cynical of conventional marketing messages - and are seldom at home. The strategy was to use money to capture their attention.
And pixilating Sir Ed proved effective. Well over a thousand of Auckland's Digital Natives had signed up for the new service in the first few days.
The sculpture was displayed at Auckland's central Britomart train station, allowing commuters to tear off a Post-It sticker as they walked by. The art installation was decimated within a week. But, by then 30,000 travelers and their numerous friends knew all about pago.
The promotion was completed by turning bus stop shelters into Hypertag/ Bluetooth terminals that dispensed digital pago money credit to the curious, via infra-red relays to cell phones.
[via Numismater]
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