Nationwide’s innovative use of social media to drive customer adoption and usage of contactless technology helped the UK’s largest mutual to win RBI’s annual global award for best use of digital marketing and social media. Douglas Blakey reports
The brief: to launch a social media campaign that would capture the imagination of the public and drive customer adoption and usage of contactless technology. While the growth in contactless payments has seen a massive boost in metropolitan centres such as London, there is still the opportunity to communicate the benefits of contactless across the whole of the UK.
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For the UK’s largest building society, Nationwide, the key challenge was to develop an innovative campaign that would achieve levels of engagement that would have a measurable bottom line impact re-invigorating interest in a technology that had first been launched a decade ago.
The campaign also had to be underpinned by Nationwide’s wider business objectives which include attracting a younger demographic using innovative products and services, while driving usage of digital services to reduce the cost of cash servicing and allow rich customer data to be captured through card and digital payments usage.
Nationwide’s marketing team looked to push the boundaries externally, with a high profile and innovative campaign idea that would connect the Society with a younger demographic and tap into the UK public’s obsession with space travel.
Leveraging the publicity that UK astronaut Tim Peake gained, Nationwide aimed to make the first Contactless Payment in Space.
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By GlobalDataMaking a payment at an altitude more than three times higher than Mount Everest and as cold as the Antarctica presented unique challenges for Nationwide’s team,
The team approached key suppliers securing financial and technical assistance for the Payment in Space from a number of partners. First Data technicians had to develop a specially designed Clover Mobile terminal to process a transaction at altitude.
Engineers also worked to design a system which would make the payment and to build a casing to protect the terminal from the elements, while testing in pressure chambers was completed to ensure the terminal would continue to work at such cold temperatures.
The equipment was then connected to a weather balloon and programmed to make the payment once it reached 100,000 feet. After a number of test launches, (and having to rescue a terminal that had ‘crash landed’ in a forest) the highest ever contactless payment was made on the 12 October 2016, taking off in rural Shropshire, ascending at over 15 meters per second to reach a final altitude of 101,050 feet.
The campaign, not only tested payment technology to the limits of space, but also captured the imagination of the public.
The Contactless Payment in Space campaign reached over 100,000 people on Nationwide’ssocial channels through an integrated campaign
A successful broadcast day was also completed with 19 interviews, reaching almost 3.3 million listeners across the country, with the Nationwide’s director of payments, Paul Horlock.
The campaign also had a tangible impact on customer adoption, during the month this activity was completed, contactless payments increased by 23% from the previous month giving leaving a tangible impact on customer behaviour.
