Shortlisted 2018
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Brand
HSBC
Lead Agency
MINDSHARE
LEVERAGING AGENCY PARTNERSHIP IN DRIVING DIGITAL ACQUISITION
The Challenge
HSBC in Asia Pacific is an $8.5Bn business. But the banking industry is changing faster than HSBC is. With the explosion of digital and mobile, your bank is now in your pocket. HSBC still relied on the brick and mortar branches; further fueling the challenge in smaller markets where their footprint is out-weighed 10:1 vs local banks. In order to grow, HSBC needed to reshape their digital acquisition journey.
Asia represents 60% of the total Global business, driven by the importance of the home market of Hong Kong and the accumulation of the sizeable 11 markets in the region, Asia had to succeed
The Strategy
Build a regional centre of excellence to focus on driving digital acquisition for the bank. Leveraging Mindshare’s FAST proposition, a dedicated performance hub was built in Singapore to service the APAC region. Their primary objective was to enable HSBC’s brand & products to thrive by harnessing the power of
understanding and analysing our customers/prospects, throughout the entire consumer journey across paid, owned, and earned channels. It is a hub and spoke model, with central execution on behalf of all local markets in Asia.
The multi-disciplined team consisted of client and digital leaders, traders, data scientists, and content specialists from throughout WPP, led by Mindshare.
Based on a data driven philosophy, the hub was named VULCAN and was responsible for delivering the systems, processes, and education to enable HSBC to succeed on their digital transformation ambitions.
Over the course of the year, VULCAN would embed themselves into the HSBC organization and become an extension of their marketing team; and becoming their digital acquisition team.
The Implementation
In Jan ‘17, we were live in 3 markets, led by a team of 4. By Dec ‘17, we were live in 7 markets and effectively running acquisition campaigns via a team of 18. It was not an easy path, we faced challenges at every turn and no one in the
bank to help us solve.
With most local clients (marketing and business teams) also new to the digital journey, we had to educate them on the basics so they would buy into the agenda and trust us to deliver results with their budgets.
With no DMP, we had no access to HSBC 1st party data, so we used 3rd party data sources to replicate offline consumer segments for better targeting.
Without end to end tracking, we weren’t able to optimise against approved online applications, only applications, so we attached a unique ID to our DSP so we could manually track back approvals via the CRM teams.
With the digital team sitting outside of marketing, our recommendations couldn’t be implemented. So we set up a workshop with the digital department to run through our vision and challenges to get them on board, so we could
work together towards the same ambition.
The Result
HSBC APAC has seen 14% growth in 2017.
VULCAN delivered quality acquisition for HSBC
• +45% uplift in spends since Q1, with more markets to be onboarded in Q1 2018
• HK: 1329% higher conversion rate than other channels, -34% CPA vs KPI
• SG: +286% conversion rate and Higher Quality Audience:
o +32% Approval Rate / +10% value vs other channels
• IN: -21% CPL vs KPI and +16% validation rate of applications vs other channels
• AU: -9% CPA vs KPI with -71% blended CPA vs previous agency
Mindshare has won digital acquisition business from markets where we didn’t previously have the scope and is now being considered for global rollout.
The senior client considers this year to be the best of his career, largely due to contributions from VULCAN.