The Business Relationships People

Client: Metro Bank

Metro Bank has always steered away from convention and wanted to continue to do so for their Business Account Online (BAO), a new product, launching into a new market, at the height of the pandemic.

Our brief to acquire 5,000 business account switchers, as a small spender vs. the big banks, was a gargantuan challenge. A conventional acquisition campaign just wouldn’t do. We combined our belief that lockdowns would inspire a wave of start-ups with a showcase of their “people-people” Local Business Managers (LBMs) giving more personal, real-world help to customers. The campaign started by finding LBMs with great customer relationships, interviewing and filming them to capture relationship dynamics and highlighting how they helped get the businesses started. These stories proved so compelling they became the heart of a Guardian partnership across native articles and video. Working with creative agency, Mr President, advertising assets for audio and DAX, short-form video for social and digital display were created from them. It inspired UK start-ups so much, we smashed our new customer target by over 300%, achieved a personal best CPA, hit incredible engagement rates, lifted NPS by 109% – and won the B2B category at the Marketing Society Awards.