GOOGLE TEZ SPARKS

TitleGOOGLE TEZ SPARKS
BrandGOOGLE
Product / ServiceTEZ
CategoryD02. Use of Mobile & Devices
EntrantTOASTER LIMITED SINGAPORE BRANCH, SINGAPORE
Idea Creation TOASTER LIMITED SINGAPORE BRANCH, SINGAPORE
Production TOASTER LIMITED SINGAPORE BRANCH, SINGAPORE

Credits

Name Company Position
Melissa-Ann Chan Google Product Marketing Manager
Matt Johnson Google Motion Design Lead
Kai Yee Lee Google Illustrator
Vinod Savio Toaster Limited Singapore Branch Executive Creative Director
Marco Rotoli Toaster Limited Singapore Branch Design Director
Anirudh Chohan Toaster Limited Singapore Branch Strategy Lead
Soo Yuen Bae Toaster Limited Singapore Branch Illustrator
Lena Golubiatnikova Toaster Limited Singapore Branch Illustrator
Joyce Lee Toaster Limited Singapore Branch Animator
Reena Subramaniam Toaster Limited Singapore Branch Producer

The Campaign

To make digital payments between friends and family personal, expressive and less awkward, we launched Tez Sparks. These were quirky and cute virtual envelopes that made giving cash gifts and repaying people simple, easy and personal. We tapped into the current behaviour of peer to peer transfers with use cases like splitting a bill, gifting someone on their birthday, paying for movie or concert tickets and for monthly special occasions like mother’s day and a series of digital envelopes for daily moments that were culturally relevant rolled it out to millions of existing users. The idea was an in-app product experience and was supported with notifications. Reaching existing users in-app, the product experience prompted users to try it out when transacting with friends and family.

The Brief

The campaign spent $0 on media. Apart from creative production costs, there were no costs incurred in running the campaign as 100% of the execution was on the mobile app, which is an owned media.

Creative Execution

Rolling out to millions of users in May 2018, Tez Sparks ran in-app as a unique and delightful product experience. Reaching existing users in-app, the product experience and notifications prompted users to try them out when transacting with friends and family. Several Spark envelopes were launched and the feature was made available for 16 million users. New sparks were added frequently based on data and use cases with contextual ones for mothers day and earth day apart from daily use cases like splitting grocery bills, dining out, paying back a friend etc.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Sparks reached over 16 Million users as it was rolled out in a product update. Sparks exposed Tez users saw 20% more monthly average transactions than non exposed users overachieving our target by 2X. Over 3 Mn sparks have been sent by users so far and approximately 4% of all transactions that happen on Tez app(in the order of millions) are now with a spark. Change in behavior: The category in its early growth and is heavily reliant on promotions and cashback offers to drive engagement. Acquiring and activating users is a task that is cost heavy and competitive. We identified a culturally-relevant way of activating consumers which is different from the category and delivered a better and a more delightful user experience, getting users to transact more without a tangible gratification.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

The digital payments category in India plays has relied upon cashbacks and promos to drive adoption. We believed that brand experience could also be an effective way to get users to transact and drive adoption of digital payments. So, instead of creating another promo, we decided to look deeper into user behaviors and barriers, to design a product experience within the payments app that was rewarding, motivating and culturally relevant.

Our users were under 24-year-olds living in cities and metros, and were comfortable with technology and digital payments. In India, bringing up money matters with relatives and friends causes awkwardness as the payment appears to be cold and transactional. Most digital payments lack the warmth and personal touch of payments made in traditional forms. We realized that mere communication wasn’t good enough to solve for this barrier and we have to reimagine how a peer to peer digital transactions happen in Tez. Knowing our consumers love expressing themselves in fun and informal ways we borrowed the grammar of their online expression used in messaging apps through gifs and added a culturally relevant touch seen in traditional payments - colorful envelopes with personal messages. Our Strategy: Take the awkwardness out of paying by making online payments more expressive and personal.