Background:
In 2016, Wells Fargo was issued a combined total of $185 million in fines for opening over 1.5 million checking and savings accounts and 500,000 credit cards on behalf of customers without their consent. Over the next 7 years Wells Fargo would feel the consequences of C-suite and executive terminations, public investigations, several settlements to the U.S. government, but most importantly public distrust.
Fast forward to 2022 as Wells Fargo agrees to a final settlement of $3.7 billion over abuses tied to the fake account scandal as well as mortgages and auto loans. As the news begins to roll out Wells Fargo decides to launch a national campaign, "The Bank of Doing." Wells Fargo not only began to pay their settlement off but also donated and highlighted their core values as a company with their intent on regaining trust from their current customers.
The Ask:
How can we use paid media to emphasize Wells Fargo’s commitment to its customers and communities to drive cultural relevance and shift consumer trust across their customers?
The Challenge:
"Trust can take years to build but seconds to destroy."
The Strategy:
We sat down with WF's marketing team and learned who was affected most in their scandal. They were mainly vulnerable college students, young professionals trying to buy homes, small businesses, and immigrants. This would eventually become our target audience.
Our approach was to target these demographics on top of ALL Wells Fargo customers while also implementing an integrated media plan driving awareness across Social, Programmatic, Audio, CTV, Direct, Addressable TV, and Native.
Within Social, my team and I decided to run Brand Lift Studies within Meta's platform providing customers who see our ad 3 short questions on how they currently view Wells Fargo. By doing this we could measure how our audiences feel about our Ads towards the communities we were working with.
The Result:
Utilizing Meta was a true success for us since it's platform is video friendly and we could retarget users who've seen our ad before tapping into our brand lift study. While trust met our benchmark our study saw incredible lift in brand favorability when compared to other financial institutions with an increase of 2 points above Meta's financial service benchmark. Social also drove an efficient VCR of 70% and garnered the most impressions at 150MM. Moreover, our message was getting across to Wells Fargo customers that while trust may take a while to rebuild this was just the beginning.