Titan Outdoor UK - Analysis | Best Practice | Prudential Mortgages – Thinking Different, Thinking Brand Response

Prudential Mortgages – Thinking Different, Thinking Brand Response

Prudential Mortgages was the first of a growing number of advertisers to use Outdoor for Brand Response: one campaign to generate both brand awareness and consumer response.

The mortgage market is an extremely fast moving and competitive one and many financial brands use Outdoor to deliver essential stand-out for their brand and products. But Prudential went one step further. Their campaign objective was to not simply to promote awareness of Prudential as a mortgage provider, but to stimulate calls and help deliver sales leads.

In other words, to use Outdoor in a dual role as a brand response medium, to create brand and product awareness as well as drive direct response activity.

Campaign Activity
This campaign used a combination of Outdoor and Radio. The Outdoor element was made up of both roadside posters (48-sheets, 96-sheets and regional 6-sheets) and transport posters. The latter across the Rail network, London Underground and Bus T-sides. Radio consisted of a national campaign utilising local Radio stations.

Prudential’s golden telephone number of 0800 000 000 appeared on all Outdoor and Radio creative executions. However, the address for Prudential Mortgages website www.pru.co.uk only featured on the Outdoor element of the campaign – with the exception of buses which simply carried the telephone response.

Campaign Results
In terms of response, the Prudential Mortgages campaign was a great success. Eight weeks after the completion of the campaign, over 15,000 brand responses had been generated off the back of it. With Outdoor showing a higher level of response than Radio and a lower cost per response.

Traffic through the website also showed a massive increase over the period, which through the selective use of the web address noted above could be directly attributed to the poster campaign.

Although lower targets were originally set for Outdoor (versus Radio), the medium far outperformed Prudential’s expectations.

The Prudential campaign used strong creative, good planning and of course, an easy to remember telephone number and url address to boost response. But above all, it used a far-sighted approach to the medium. It showed that as good as Outdoor is at launching or supporting brands, it has many other key business benefits for those advertisers willing to think differently.
Or as George Lois put it “Let’s disregard signs that have been put up by clients and their brand managers and by ad agency big wigs and their no-account account executives, those signs that say “Don’t skate on thin ice”. They’re wrong because the ice is two feet thick. So put on your blades, glide ahead of the pack and do some nifty figure eights”.