Uncovering Australia’s Home Truths
Challenge
UBank re-branded in early 2016 with a new positioning around Just the Bank You Need. Supporting this positioning was a consumer-facing call to action that encouraged Aussies to ”Borrow Less, Live More.” This provocative approach started to help consumers realise that the brand was truly different – and not just another bank. In order to keep reinforcing this new positioning, we were challenged with lifting unaided awareness of the brand. And making a big, bold impact – within a relatively small budget.
Culture
Australians have become obsessed with the ‘Australian Dream’, which is the idea that the house you buy is the quarter acre block with the hills hoist in the yard. With the property market continuing to be unpredictable and with house prices skyrocketing, research showed that this ‘dream’ is becoming out of reach for many Australians.
Creativity
We wanted to encourage Australians to re-shape the Australian dream for themselves. This meant encouraging Australians to find their own dream based on what they could comfortably afford, and not the “old” dream that was created 50 years ago. To do this, we created a campaign called “Home Truths” aimed at shining a light on the uncomfortable truths that people live with in order to afford a home. To launch the campaign, a controversial video was created called ‘Real Estate Tips From The Terminally Ill’ (RETFTTI) which asked 6 terminally ill people what they thought was important in life. The advice was universal - family and friends, not things are most important. And overextending yourself for a home loan just isn’t worth it. We engaged a former palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware, who wrote the famous book ‘Top 5 regrets of dying’, to be a lead spokesperson given her expertise in the area. Bronnie featured on Sunrise and in the News.com.au exclusive. To then continue the momentum, we commissioned ‘Home Truths’ research that looked at the extreme measures Australians undertake to meet unrealistic mortgage payments was launched that further cemented that Australians are putting their mortgage over the things they love and that a shift in focus was needed.
Clout
The RETFTTI launch saw exclusives with the AFR, Sunrise and News.com.au launch the campaign. Overall, 63 articles were achieved for the video reaching a global audience of 104,497,980 The Home Truths research was launched with an exclusive with News Corp and accompanied with a Radio Release, saw 164 pieces of coverage secured, reaching an audience of 21,404,273.
