• by Fran Pasero , September 21, 2006

Money marketers try video, blogs, and search tactics to lure new customers

Financial services companies are among the biggest advertisers on the Internet. In 2005, the industry accounted for 12 percent of all U.S. online advertising - about $1.5 billion of the $12.5 billion total for the year, according to The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

This year, rising interest rates and a jittery stock market have made marketing financial services to consumers tricky. Yet online efforts by three industry leaders have risen to the challenge. MasterCard Inter-national leveraged its highly successful "Priceless" TV campaign with a contest inviting consumers to create their own "Priceless" commercials online. Mutual fund giant Vanguard Group reminded customers and prospects to stay the course with an investor education campaign relying on new interactive technology. MetLife leveraged banner and keyword ads featuring its familiar mascot, Snoopy, to tout the money market accounts of its MetLife Bank, a relative newcomer to the competitive online banking arena. Here's a closer look at the three efforts:

MasterCard International:

The idea for MasterCard's Priceless.com campaign came from consumers. The "Priceless" TV spots were widely parodied on blogs and by comedians. "People were submitting ideas unsolicited," says Cheryl Guerin, MasterCard's vice president-promotions and interactive marketing.

Launched in March of 2006, when "Priceless" TV spots broke during ABC's Academy Awards broadcast, the online campaign invited consumers to create a commercial on the Web site Priceless.com. Users could write their own ad copy for one of two 30-second video formats - simply by filling in the blanks. In one spot, "Sailboat," the voiceover says "Blank, $52" while showing a man in a small boat rowing towards a larger vessel. Two more "blanks" with dollar amounts follow. The kicker at the end is "Blank, Blank, Blank, Priceless."

The contest, which ended May 28, "attracted 100,000 entries," Guerin says. The commercial was recreated with the winning copywriter's prose and broke in August on TV and on the "Priceless" Web site. The site includes an interview with the winner and offers behind-the-scenes footage on the making of the commercial.

Since launch, there have been more than 4 million page views during 800,000 visits to the "Priceless" Web site. "Visitors stay an average of more than seven minutes, twice as much as on MasterCard.com," Guerin says.

Articles on topics from fashion and travel to home decorating and technology are included in the "articles" portion of the site, interspersed with credit card promotions and links to MasterCard's merchant partners.

Site content is updated weekly and is available as an RSS feed that comes directly to the user's desktop.

Vanguard Group:

At the start of 2006, Vanguard upgraded its "Plain talk about investing" campaign to include an online library of five-page digital books. "The change was appropriate because more people are using the Web for investment decisions," says Sean Hagerty, Vanguard's principal in charge of marketing.

The Web address is included in Vanguard's print ad with the copy, "The high road to low-cost investing," which appears in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Time, and Forbes.

Online ads were placed on Dow Jones' Marketwatch.com, Yahoo Finance, msn Money, and several other financial Web sites. The library, created by Vanguard's in-house financial planners and writers, appears prominently on Google. In addition to traditional keywords such as "Vanguard" and "index funds," the new campaign added "high road" and "low cost."

Vanguard plans to add more keywords to its search engine ad buys and increase content for the library; the site now hosts six books, with at least three more planned. The books are not PDFs; they rely on a new technology similar to Flash, developed by Y&R partner VML.

"You see the book open and have the ability to turn pages and scroll down," Hagerty says.

Users reading the "Low-Cost Investing" book can plug mutual fund costs into an online calculator. The "Investment Planning Basics" book includes a podcast with Vanguard chairman John J. "Jack" Brennan. Vanguard podcasts can be downloaded from Apple's iTunes site.

Listener ratings have been strong, Hagerty notes. Best of all, the cost of podcast marketing is modest. Vanguard, known for its rock-bottom investment fees, has no plans to increase the size of its advertising budget.

"Overall, we're happy. The click-through rates have increased on our online ads and the

number of people interacting on the High Road site has exceeded our expectations, especially for the quiet summer period," Hagerty says.

MetLife Bank:

With savings accounts now yielding close to 5 percent, banks are winning new attention from consumers, and competition for deposits is heating up. To drive money market account openings, in conjunction with a print advertising campaign, MetLife Bank teamed up with its corporate e-commerce department for a brief online marketing campaign.

The campaign, which ran from April to May 2005, included banner ads and keyword search buys. "We paid to be at the top of the search on Yahoo and msn," says Melissa Macerato, assistant vice president, MetLife Bank. Many of the banner ads continue to run on such financial sites as Bankrate, MSN, Moneyrate, Investorguide, and Yahoo.

"The click-through rate was 0.57 percent. There were 11 million impressions," Macerato says.

The campaign drew more than 1,100 new customers and more than $22 million in new deposits. "The number of new accounts, average deposits per account, and cost per account open were all very positive," Macerato adds.

Most notably, the cost to acquire each account dropped to $200, from an average of $350 prior to the campaign.

"We'll certainly look to do this again in the future when our budget allows," says Macerato.