financial services

Amex Shows How 'Change' Works For It

AmexPass 

Five months ago, American Express set out to build awareness of a new product, a prepaid PASS for teens to use instead of cash. So far, awareness is up 96%, sales exceed the forecast by 10% and the company has found that the key to its strategy is the use of cross-funneling.

Mark Neirick, VP/GM of prepaid interactive (think gift cards and travelers checks) with Amex, told attendees at Tuesday's MediaPost Communications event, "Change: The Digital Transformation Summit" that consumers who were exposed to both general awareness efforts and targeted efforts "responded more highly than those exposed only to one funnel."

The summit is bringing together people who have taken risks, to embrace change in the new digital world of marketing and marketers who seek direction. In the first few presentations, the audience heard from Amex, Gillette and Alberto Culver.

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Jenna Griffith, VP of platform account at MediaMath, which worked with Amex for its PASS, explained how the cross-funnel strategy works. "Response rates increased significantly enough to make up for [the cost of] hitting people in premium and reach environments," she said. The strategy was chosen because there was no awareness of PASS.

"We wanted to tie efforts down to the bottom of the funnel [the targeted group] and then optimize the results," Griffith says. "Traditional media buying strategies are inefficient. They involve handing over power of optimization to the publisher. And there are no cross-channel learnings. The advertiser can't leverage anything."

Earlier, the assembled heard from Bernhard Glock, former VP of media for Procter & Gamble, who used a 60-second TV commercial (Apple's "1984") to illustrate the death of the :30. He detailed a campaign for Gillette that took place in India, where the brand faced an uphill battle in gaining a foothold.

Urging others to "thrive on social phenomena," Glock explained how Gillette and its agency got Indian men to shave in just eight weeks. First, he said, they needed to understand Indian men and women and how they debate. Then they started a debate on whether clean-shaven men were more successful and sexier than those with beards.

"We got half the population to get the other half to shave," he said, using women to speak about how much they preferred the smooth looks. And they engaged three leading actresses to speak on the topic, let men try the product, and even staged a Guinness World Record event to that end. In eight weeks, sales were up 500%.

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