Bank Of Montreal - Marketing Campaign of the Year - COVID-19-related

Company: Bank Of Montreal
Company Description: We’re proud to be fueling growth and expanding possibilities for individuals, families and businesses. More than 12 million customers count on us for personal and commercial banking, wealth management and investment services.
Nomination Category: COVID-19 Response Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Marketing Campaign of the Year - COVID-19-related Information

Nomination Title: COVID 19: Road to Recovery

We launched Road to Recovery, a new, digital thought leadership advertising campaign, to raise brand awareness outside of Canada by leveraging our Capital Markets expertise while helping clients navigate a reopening amidst COVID-19. From macro-economics to M&A and Corporate Treasury, the campaign spoke to client appetite for insight into what recovery might look like. The goal of the campaign was to create consideration for BMO by distributing thought leadership content to help our clients navigate the impact of the pandemic amidst the reopening via content distribution and using a digital-first strategy targeted to investors and the C-suite. Results were measured through website traffic and paid advertising including Content Marketing Score, Average Time Spent on content, CTR, Video Completion Rate, Video Engagement Rate.

COVID-19 provided an opportunity to leverage the growing appetite for engaging content and position BMO as a strategic partner in the pandemic. We knew a winning campaign must twin growing client demand for partnerships and information – 55% of decision-makers say they use thought leadership as an important way to vet business, and almost half spend an hour or more per week reading thought-leadership. We underscored our expertise through pieces in leading digital media outlets, including social media (LinkedIn), programmatic advertising (Google & Stack Adapt), podcast advertising (Megaphone that could have been heard on podcasts such as The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Seeking Alpha, C-Suite Radio, others) and Bloomberg terminal advertising.

From the outset, Road to Recovery was designed to be innovative, reflecting the once-in-a-lifetime fact of COVID-19. Keen to hit our audience quickly and directly, we extended our B2B advertising master platform We Work Here (WWH) to all creative to demonstrate Capital Markets’ deep expertise, with WWH platform Ads featuring a visual icon, a BMO branded flag, to establish our commitment to clients across our lines of business. We drove interest and context by using our flag in surprising new ways to make concrete connections to the headline, and took a journey-based, fresh, holistic media strategy to effectively distribute BMO content.