ANZ CMO: Gaming ads working ‘far better than anything we have seen so far … even for 45 year olds’
ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra: "It's not just teenagers or college students. Frankly, I would say those aged up to 40, 45 years old are engaged."
ANZ is mining a rich audience seam via gaming, tapping gaming influencers, video and interactive experiences to bring players back to its properties and into its funnel. CMO Sweta Mehra said while the bank was initially targeting millennials, it is finding that gaming is far broader, with 40-somethings engaging via a channel that she said is performing way beyond expectations.
What you need to know:
- ANZ is mining a rich seam of audience engagement via gaming per CMO Sweta Mehra.
- “It's not just teenagers or college students. Frankly, I would say those aged up to 40, 45 years old are engaged.”
- In terms of bringing younger audiences back to ANZ’s site and engaging with content, the gaming foray to date is “better than anything else we have seen or done so far".
The traffic that we are generating, the interactions that we are seeing, the interest and the amount of time that [people] are spending on that content is absolutely well ahead of everything that we were expecting from these sources.
Reaching audiences through games advertising is working “far better than anything else we have seen or done so far,” according to ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra, moving the needle beyond vanity metrics and bringing potential customers into the bank’s digital properties.
Mehra said ANZ had started targeting gamers in a bid to attract millennials – but had found a much richer seam of untapped audiences.
“It's not just teenagers or college students. Frankly, I would say those aged up to 40, 45 years old are engaged,” she said, with the bank subsequently working out how to best convert those audiences beyond ad placements.
At the younger end, Mehra said working with gaming influencers creating videos and “interactive activities, something fun at the end”, is paying dividend.
“We've not gone to the extent where we're saying ‘hey, we'll have a big presence in the metaverse’ but we are experimenting with smaller things. What we are learning is this is working far better than anything else that we have seen or done so far,” said Mehra.
ANZ’s marketing team “doesn’t really care a whole lot about impressions, more about how many people are completing the videos, engaging with the brand, how many are coming to our site and then checking their financial wellbeing scores,” said Mehra, with the bank’s latest positioning, ‘Financial Wellbeings’ via Special Group in market since April.
“The traffic that we are generating, the interactions that we are seeing, the interest and the amount of time that [people] are spending on that content is absolutely well ahead of everything that we were expecting from these sources.”
PwC last year estimated Australia’s gaming ad spend at just $64m. Proponents argue it is the perhaps the largest mass-media channel that has been almost entirely overlooked by advertisers, citing data that suggests there are 12.3m gamers in Australia aged 16-64, of which 6.3m are female.
Mehra said she “could not begin to guess at the rest of the industry” in terms of seemingly underweight gaming investment, but underlined that ANZ’s foray into gaming “is a very deliberate strategy to go and learn”.
“We have done a few things which work. We've done a few things that did not work as well,” she acknowledged. “Overall, though, if you look at our [gaming] experimentation in total, we are definitely seeing it as a big success.”
Listen to a full podcast interview with ANZ CMO Sweta Mehra, unpacking the digital brand skills gap, ANZ’s overhaul of its martech stack, and how personalisation and ‘nudge theory’ is delivering customer and commercial gains, here. Or read a deeper interview here.
