2020 Winner
2020 Winners
Questrade
It’s Time To Switch, Year 4
The Canadian banking system is one of the most profitable in the world. In fact, RBC made more profit last year than Amazon did, globally. And so did TD.
However, in addition to profitability, the traditional system is steeped in a long history of consumer trust. Canadians view the big banks as reliable, strong and able to keep their money safe. The 2008 global banking crisis is a clear demonstration of the strength of the Canadian system vs others.
And 85% of Canadians invest with the traditional system.
Our challenge was to give consumers a compelling reason to move away from traditional investing options. To challenge their confidence in the system and prove that a better alternative exists.
To do this, we had to highlight the key issue. That high profitability and high fees proved the traditional system was not working in Canadians best interest. And we had to empower consumers to take control of their financial futures.
We set extremely aggressive targets for our results. Our goal was to achieve 25% growth in new account openings year over year (2020 vs 2019).
Insights and Strategy
Our original campaign was built on the insight that Canadians know that banks are highly profitable. And they had a growing awareness that this profit comes from high fees. While this has been successful, we discovered that knowing about high fees wasn’t enough to motivate less financially confident Canadians to action. We needed to show them that hesitating had very real consequences. That every day they waited, those high fees were eroding their investment potential and the security of their retirements.
Our campaign continued to seed dissent among big bank investors. And leaned heavily into proof of Questrade’s benefit….retiring up to 30% wealthier. Wrapped around this was a call to take action (switch now) and an invitation to see the proof of the Questrade difference with our calculator tool.
Execution
In previous years of this campaign, messaging focused on the exact moment of advisor confrontation. The creative depicted consumers challenging their investment advisor about the true value they received for their money. The bold, stark language and acute tension of the moment left no doubt about the fact that banks don’t work in the consumers best interest.
In this year’s campaign, we built on that foundation and focused on more intimate moments of the consumer’s realization. Personal moments between couples and families when they realize they must act now, and take control of their finances.
Our campaign showed just how much high fees reduced a consumer’s retirement nest egg and how much more they could have if they switched to Questrade.
We also invited consumers to see the proof for themselves with our simple-to-use calculator that instantly showed how Questrade could provide 30% more in retirement savings.
High impact OOH supported the dissent, invitation to learn more, and urgency messages.
Our mass media was placed in high visibility, leadership positions. Appointment television, drive time radio and breakthrough outdoor placements like a Yonge/Bloor subway domination.
Mass was complemented by content and digital advertising that provided additional reasons to believe and invitations to try our calculator. Heavy SEM activities complemented the campaign and harvested consumers at the bottom of the funnel.
Results and Impact
Quite simply, the campaign exceeded all expectations, shattered the target objectives, and created the two highest quarters of growth in Questrade history.
We targeted an aggressive 25% increase of new account growth, however, in the period of Jan 1 - June 30, 2020, new accounts grew by an incredible 42%.