When the National Association of German Cooperative Banks (BVR – Bundesverband der Deutschen Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken) wanted to drive awareness to local banks, it chose local advertising. This was a logical choice, considering national-level ads are difficult to tailor to specific banks and their offerings. With 814 member banks, this campaign presented a challenge at best – The question of the campaign was not to replace traditional print. It was more to bring-in local flavor to national campaigns. In traditional TV or Magazine print campaigns, it is impossible to tailor the ads with the logo of the local banks (as every bank has its own logo). Instead, the BVR opted for local digital ads – as made possible by Adcombi’s Hyperlocal Ad technology.
Banks from “Here”
The BVR was pushing a national campaign to individual member banks, each of which is its own full company. Reinforcing ‘local’ was important. People trust local banks, go to local banks, and can visit local banks to quickly answer questions, find solutions, and get customer service. And, with some 12,000 individual bank branches falling under the umbrella of the BVR, highlighting local branches was important.
"We want to position ourselves as 'banks from here'.”
Setting up the campaign
Mindshare, a global media agency, in cooperation with the agency VR Networld were selected to create and run the campaign – in combination with GroupM, which provided ad inventory. They selected Adcombi’s Hyperlocal ad technology and build the campaign around its possibilities – namely the ability to location-target ads based on zip-code, allowing for local advertising on digital platforms.
The campaign, which was run across 7 channels, including desktop, mobile, inapp, instream, outstream, Facebook, and Instagram.
Here, we used Adcombi’s polygon and zip-code targeting capabilities. This allowed us to set up advertising areas for every individual bank branch in the campaign, using their zip-code service areas. That sometimes involved setting up multiple polygon target areas per branch – to cover their full service area.
Then, each bank shared its logo and other custom data. That was uploaded into video and banner ads – where the platform can pull the correct media in real-time. In some cases, like with video ads, those more than 800 video variations had to be pre-produced and pulled from a library in real-time, as ads were triggered.
National budget, local ads
“The campaign is a milestone for Adcombi and for advertising, because it’s the first time we’ve implemented a hyperlocal cross-media campaign across video, desktop, mobile, and social media”, says Adcombi’s Germany Managing Director, Sebastian Kraemer.
The BVR provided the budget for the campaign, primarily based on bank size and service area size. Individual banks provided their own data, which was put-together in-house by Mindshare and VR Networld. Then, it was pushed to Adcombi’s platform and the DSP. When an ad was triggered, it first checked the location and then showed the bank relevant to that location – so the viewer always saw the bank nearest to them.
The result? When an ad was triggered, it showed local bank logos and locations, based on the viewers location. That was all run through a single campaign, paid for by the BVR, with individual budgets per bank.
Eventually, the campaign was a success, garnering some 104 million impressions across 7 channels. Adcombi’s technology enabled the BVR to pull off a local, cross-media campaign, localizing a national advertising strategy.
"As 'banks from here', we always want to make the local sender visible. With Hyperlocal technology, this was possible in a simple, efficient way” says Marc Weegen of the BVR, “This allowed us to communicate to the desired target group with a personalized message across maximum reach."
