Thinkbox
Key Points
- True Potential wanted to drive brand awareness and establish trust
- They tried TV for the first time with spots in the Rugby World Cup and targeted ads in BVOD
- As a result, they grew brand awareness by 27 percentage points
The Challenge
True Potential is a fin-tech company that holds £33 billion of assets on its platform. Since its launch in 2007, it had been growing steadily, mainly through referrals from financial advisors, but had never advertised directly to the customer before.
In 2023, the company decided to advertise in order to grow the business and employed SD Advertising to facilitate this. The first step for SDA was to conduct research into what people thought and felt about financial planning in general and True Potential as a brand. The results showed, among other things, that brand awareness was very low with less than 1% spontaneous awareness and only 16% prompted awareness.
The key objectives for the advertising were to raise brand awareness and to establish True Potential as a trusted partner to invest with. Secondary aims were to increase understanding of the services True Potential offer and get the target market thinking about taking action to reach their financial goals.
The TV Solution
As True Potential had never advertised before, SDA recommended testing in one region first before embarking on a bigger, national campaign. They selected the North West as the ideal region and chose TV as the best medium for driving awareness and trust.
They ran a 3-month brand awareness campaign in that region with a simple 10 second ad showing True Potential’s logo and a basic message. This was all about sowing the seed for the bigger campaign to follow.
For the next level, they created a compelling 30 second ad that focused on the goals in life that we all have and how enlisting help from True Potential can help you realise them.
The Plan
Research showed that the optimum context would be when their target audience were enjoying family life or leisure time. The Rugby World Cup on ITV1 provided the ideal placement for the ads and so SDA negotiated a package of spots in this tournament that went out in the North West region, including some key home nations and England games.
This was supported by spots on ITVX, Sky AdSmart and Channel 4 Streaming, also in the North West region. For increased targeting, they selected an audience of ‘Established Investors’ and ‘Money Makers’.
They produced a 10 second cut down of the ad and ran the 30 second hero piece to drive reach with the 10 second cutdown providing cost effective frequency.
The TV campaign was supported by cinema, online video, digital display, YouTube and OOH, including DOOH.
Results
Prompted brand awareness, in the North West, increased from 16% to 43% - an increase of 27 percentage points and three times the target uplift
The campaign attracted a huge increase in new clients joining True Potential – 51% increase in the three months since launch
Local wealth management partners have noted a much more positive and warm reaction when True Potential is suggested to customers
57% said the advert made them want to act in the future to achieve their financial goals with 56% wanting to act immediately
Three quarters of those who had seen the advert said that they had taken action – most popular action was visiting the True Potential website
Following the success of this campaign, the campaign has been rolled out on a national level
True Potential launched our first above the line campaign after 18 years of business in 2023, focusing on the North-West, moving to a full national strategy in 2024. One of the challenges that we brought to Clare (from SD Advertising) is that we were concerned with such a large-scale launch is that, to the public, the True Potential brand is relatively unknown. Clare helped devise a strategy to run a brand awareness campaign in the North West / Manchester area to see if we could improve brand awareness in advance of the full national campaign. The results of this are as follows: Awareness in Manchester – increase from 16% to 43% Needless to say, the support, creative thinking and strategic work that Clare achieved was fundamental to the success of our brand awareness campaign and gave the business the confidence in a full national launch – which because of Clare I have no doubt in the success of this too.
Tom LambHead of Campaigns and Advertising at True Potential
Results
Sector: Fin tech
Brand: True Potential
Campaign objectives: To drive brand awareness
Target Audience: ABC1 men aged 35 to 54
Budget: Approx. £120,000 for the TV campaign
Campaign Dates: 7th to 29th October 2023
TV Usage: 30 second and 10 second spots
Media Agency: SD Advertising