Background

When it comes to finances, Australia’s millennials have it harder than previous generations. Australia’s used to the good life but cost of living is going through the roof, increasing at the fastest rate in four years as our campaign was going live. Our audience are stuck living at home, the job market is so squeezed part-time roles are common place. It’s no wonder their spending is tightening. PayPal had a problem. A large section of their userbase were drifting off, counting every cent. The very audience that embrace digital life, were going back to cash as a way of controlling their spending. PayPal’s role was under threat. So, we needed to reaffirm PayPal’s core value propositions of convenience and protection for your money. Whilst also helping Aussies realise that PayPal is available on 95% of online merchants even though only 37% of Australians believe it’s where they shop online.

Describe the creative idea

When times are hard we all look for creative, cost-effective ways to buy a little happiness. Our idea was to help lighten the load, giving PayPal customers easy and fun reasons to do so with the push of a little blue button. So we dialed up our creativity to cut through the staid communications being peddled by the financial community and entertain our audience with an idea that showcased the joy PayPal can unleash. Using research into the happiness simple purchases can bring to life, we teamed up with our brand ambassador, Matt Okine, one of Australia’s leading comedians and a millennial favourite. Together we hit the streets of Sydney, stopping people with a surprise and delight moment challenging them to spend $500 cold hard cash on whatever they want?! They just needed to use PayPal and needed to spend it quick - ‘5 Minutes Flat with Matt’ was born.

Describe the strategy

It was imperative to find a way to stop our internet savvy audience in their digital tracks and put PayPal front of mind the next time they shopped online. And the best place to do that when you’re targeting existing customers is your own Facebook page. There’s 75k followers highly engaged with us, especially through their mobile where they have a deeper engagement with content than they do through their TV With Facebook video matching YouTube performance, it presents a very effective entertainment channel to reach our target and broaden their understanding of the brand’s offer. Episodic content told 5 different people’s stories to showcase more breadth of merchants you can shop with using PayPal and appeal to different audiences. Living in an owned channel also has the benefit of capturing data on who viewed, what and for how long that was used to deliver additional comprehension messages.

Describe the execution

We started with research into how much gratification we get from everyday purchases. Using our stable of micro influencers to spread our findings and their happiness inspiration, our fans and media picked it up. We simultaneously created a series of 5 webisodes and a teaser piece that was used to drive viewership overall. Releasing them between 29th June and 13th August 2018. We managed frequency of our post being shared within Facebook, where we were able to access not just the highest opportunity audience, but also do so with confidence after overlaying precision targeting to both reach AND engage our priority Australian audiences. With a limited budget of $25k AUD for paid the results were reliant on the content hitting a home run with our following on Facebook. Which we did - achieving a 3.5x more cost effective campaign than the digital display campaign running at the same time.

List the results

We executed a multi-tiered media strategy to tell the story of Australians relishing smaller, everyday purchases which give them instant gratification. Which had widespread radio coverage on 114 stations across Australia achieved 148 clips across print, online and TV coverage, with an estimated reach of 1.3 million. The comedy paid off for PayPal too. The campaign achieved 10x more engagement than the brand’s always on digital activity* And with an average 61% continuation rate for viewers who watched half an episode, we had people hooked on the brand message – ‘pay the easy way with PayPal’. Delivering a 3.5x more cost effective CPC (cost per click)* All adding up us smashing our transaction target by 53%* And nearly quadrupling the target for in-month user growth *more info in confidential section