Fallon - Fallon Minneapolis' Citibank advertising strategy - Brief Article

Brandweek, June 18, 2001 by Tony Case

Best use of newspapers

It's not your grandfather's bank ad.

Fallon Minneapolis, winner of this year's Plan of the Year for newspaper advertising, snagged the Citibank account by promising to be "unbanklike" in its approach. The result: a series of whimsical ads promoting the bank's various financial services, appearing in unorthodox sections of the paper and sporting catch phrases like "Sometimes wealth is buying the $6 popcorn and not obsessing over the fact that you just paid $6 for popcorn."

Another appeal, promoting Citibank's home-equity line of credit, drew in readers with the hook: "There's got to be at least $25,000 hidden in your house. We can help you find it."

Still another spot showed up in the comics section, of all places. Alongside Peanuts and Doonesbury, the ad declared: "Sometimes wealth is having time to read these."

After the initial, attention-grabbing one-liners, each ad went on to explain the benefits of a particular banking service. Some included a toll-free telephone number and Web address. Every ad ended with the distinctive, red-colored Citibank logo, along with the tagline "Live richly."

With the campaign, Fallon faced the challenging task of promoting the one-on-one, personalized services of a financial behemoth to a mass audience faced with growing competition for their dollar-and, consequently, an explosion of advertising messages. Breaking through all the clutter was no simple task.

"We went through a lot of creative explorations to figure out what the line was. But we also needed to break away from the traditional way banks talk about themselves, which was to concentrate on their functional attributes or to talk about you and your money in a sappy way," said Maggie Shea, Fallon's group account director over the Citibank business. "We needed to find an emotional connection that felt fresh, modern, sophisticated and reassuring."

The campaign, with its clever catch phrases, sought not only to stand out from more traditional, somber banking ads, but also to be, in the agency's words, "iconic." The ads were "intentionally not page-dominant," said Fallon's media director Lisa Seward, who also served as a Plan of the Year judge. "They did pop off the page, but were small and charming, in a quiet voice."

Financial institutions have long been devoted users of newspapers, with their deep reach and rapt readership. It might be old-fashioned, but newspaper advertising proved to be a powerful element of the Citibank campaign, according to the agency. "It might have been easy, in being 'unbanklike,' to dismiss the medium, which is used in abundance by local banks," Seward said. "But [newspaper] also offers a lot of opportunity we hadn't realized. The timeliness and flexibility definitely plays a role. When you're launching a product ... you have to ensure your ad is seen on a particular day. Newspapers get the daily reader, while a magazine audience accumulates over time. You also can quickly go to press with an ad."

The media director added that newspapers' ad departments proved helpful in alerting the agency to other bank ads, when and where they were running, so Citibank could ensure it got the best possible placement.

Besides Seward and Shea, Fallon troops associated with the campaign included AOR director Alan Higley, connection planner Doug Holroyd, media supervisors Demian Brink and Tasha Kruger, media planners Jen Shadowens and Deb Linksvayer, and assistant media planners Eric Ferch and Anne Padilla. Fallon got the Citibank account in August of last year.

The six-week newspaper campaign, which began in mid January and was budgeted at $1,975,000, ran in 19 dailies across nine markets, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, Miami, Las Vegas, Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y. Fallon, which both created and placed the ads, used the dominant newspapers in those markets, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Miami Herald, as well as smaller, more specialized vehicles, such as the Herald's Spanish-language edition, El Nuevo Herald. The newspaper element was part of a broader, multimedia effort that encompassed national broadcast, cable, magazine and outdoor. Newspaper accounted for 7 percent of the overall campaign. Fallon estimates that 30 million consumers were exposed to the newspaper ads alone.

More important than exposure, the campaign apparently drove traffic in a big way. After ads ran for Citipro, a new Citibank financial service, inquiries at bank branches shot up a whopping 47 percent.

Fallon broke the print side of the campaign into three parts. First, to tweak readers during the first week of the campaign, the agency rolled out small color units, layered three-deep in various sections of the paper, including the comics, movie listings and the main-news section.

Then, for the next five weeks, the agency switched to larger ads offering greater detail about Citibank's services. Those ads ran in the main section of papers, as opposed to more traditional, business-section placement.