What you need to know:

• NAB’s brand flip to JAB amid maximum Covid pushback – riots in Melbourne and a polarised community – led to some queasy stomachs. But the bank held its nerve and the move, executed within seven days of sign-off, moved the needle.
• NAB copped flak on social – particularly Facebook – but the anti-vaxxers didn’t follow through on closing their accounts. Instead, NAB gained “thousands” of new customers, per brand chief Faycal Ben Abdellaziz.
• More importantly, he says, it helped Australia reopen its economy and push out of lockdown earlier than expected.
• Mindshare Business Lead Mark Tzintzis says it wasn’t easy targeting the vaccine hesitant – hence going broad with the ARL final … in Perth – and then targeting geographical and demographic pockets as vaccine rate data came in.
• Mindshare Strategy Director, Tanvi Singh, says anti-vaxxers actually helped accelerate the JAB message to go “almost viral”.
• As a result of business and customer gains (with Mindshare estimating an ROI of $16.90 per dollar spent) NAB picked up an MFA award for Brand Impact last month.
• Ben Abdellaziz says the legacy is the belief to be bold and “hold the line” when it comes to brand purpose and investment – and states that NAB won’t be pulling back, no matter what the economy throws up next.

Viral marketing

Risk aversion runs deep in banks, so there was no little trepidation in deciding to change NAB’s brand to JAB mid-Covid, amid peak polarisation and protests.

But the bank held the line – ultimately winning kudos, new business and playing at least some role in Australia re-opening weeks ahead of schedule, according to NAB brand chief Faycal Ben Abdellaziz. Plus, an MFA gong for Brand Impact to boot.

Ultimately, says Ben Abdellaziz, the decision to flip NAB's brand was grounded in economic reality: Business had ground to a halt and the bank and its customers were sick. Everyone needed a shot in the arm, fast.

“We were seeing one in three businesses reporting more than 50 per cent loss of revenues. As Australia’s biggest business bank, NAB was directly impacted – and the only way for businesses to start operating properly again was through the economy opening up,” says Ben Abdellaziz. “The economy could only open up if we reached the Australian government's ambitious 80 per cent double vaccination rate, which was set in July 2021.”

But vaccination status had become polarising and by September, just as NAB was planning to launch JAB, riot police were deployed over several days in Melbourne as protests turned violent.

“Most brands at that time were staying away from this controversial topic – and the increasingly vocal and hostile antivaxxer community. So we decided to change that,” adds Ben Abdellaziz. “We knew if we threw our weight behind an unashamedly pro-vax push, it would ultimately pay dividends for society, and NAB as a business.”

Protective gear

When the final brief came back via the brand team and the agency village – TBWA, Six Black Pens and Mindshare – there was something of a collective gulp.

“Once the ideas started coming back, there was a moment there where we said, 'okay, this is going to be big',” says Ben Abdellaziz. “But we employ 34,000 people and we had been living this for the last year and a half – and something needed to happen… At the same time, I don't think we knew exactly what we had on our hands until we'd seen the NAB JAB idea.”

Buy-in from the top, NAB Chief Executive Ross McEwan, helped bolster collective resolve amid fear of blowback.

“The challenge that we had was best summarised to us by our CEO: How can we encourage Australians to get vaccinated so that the economy can open up again? The first objective was societal – encourage Australians to reach 80 per cent double vax by December 2021. Then we tied brand objectives to that: improving our reputation score as well as driving a lift in consideration for customers and non-customers alike.”

That was the crux of the brief put to the agency village – and the brief had to be live seven days after sign off to make the AFL final on 25 September. That resulted in an almost immediate audience of three million people, and an even swifter backlash. But the marketing team and agencies had already laid the ground to keep a lid on fear and ensure nobody capitulated in the face of what NAB’s research suggested was “less than five per cent” of the populace deemed staunch anti-vaxxers.

“There was an expectation that we would get some turbulence and yes, we did get it, in particular through the keyboard warriors in channels such as Facebook,” said Ben Abdellaziz.

But contextualising the blowback – “300 negative comments on Facebook [versus] we’re reaching millions of people” was key and Ben Abdellaziz says internal teams had already been briefed for what to expect on a day-by-day basis: “This is what we would expect to see from day one to three. You might see a spike in negative commentary … but usually by day three, day four, that tide turns and that is when people raise their voices and come to your defence.”

The key point was that it was not hardcore anti-vaxxers that NAB was trying to persuade – but those wavering, the vax-hesitant. Hence, “‘hold the line’ became the mantra”, per Ben Abdellaziz.

“We knew what the data was showing us, we knew the insights, we had the research at our hands, we had a feel in terms of what the reaction would be. But I think the most important bit in all of this was having the courage to hold the line and see it through. Don't react at the first sign.”

Inevitably, he says, some corporate horses were spooked.

“There were some wobbles, but more so in the sense of the questions being asked, ‘are we doing the right thing? Should we be coming back here or should we wait? Could we do more?’ And the answer was always, ‘no, we hold the line’. We put milestones in place purposely so that we had various pause points to just stop, reflect, and ask do we need to change tack or strategy? But I'm proud to say that by the time this work was completed, the strategy had remained the same. We held the line all the way through.”

Taking effect

Within a week, most of the mainstream media was onboard and other brands had started to come to market with pro-vax pushes – and NAB JAB was starting to literally move the needle.

After reaching three million people in the first weekend, it eventually reached 15 million, per Mindshare Business Lead Mark Tzintzis, citing marketing research outfit Hall & Partners’ calculations that NAB Jab ultimately led to “meaningful exposure in terms of campaign recognition of 6.4 million people”.

“As Faycal mentioned, we wanted to reach the vaccine hesitant, which by some reports were about 13 per cent of the population. So we really needed a broad reaching as well as highly targeted strategy that had dynamic elements to it,” says Tzintzis. “The proof is in the pudding. We opened up about two or three weeks earlier than initially planned by the government. I believe our efforts went some ways in helping to achieve that.”

Strategy planning

Tzintzis says the agencies knew that they were “about to do something special … you could feel it in the virtual briefing room” and that the seven-day turnaround was critical, given NAB was a key sponsor of the AFL and the prelim final, between Melbourne and Geelong, was being played a week later – in Perth.

“Two really big Melbourne clubs with a huge following should be playing at the MCG with 100,000 crowd in attendance. Instead, it was played at Optus stadium. Everyone in Melbourne in particular felt that there was something wrong here. So that's why we launched within that match. We had our TVC, which had the JAB end frame, we had the LED signage throughout the game and we also had in-program integration, which really helped sell the message,” says Tzintzis.

“Throughout the first weekend, we reached over three million people alone with our JAB launch. It was really important to not only leverage the AFL and the huge asset that we have at our disposal, but also do in a way that was genuine and authentic to the audience that we're talking to.”

Meanwhile, it hooked up APIs to audio and out of home channels to keep driving the message with latest vaccine rates tied to creative assets – with a positive stance, according Mindshare Strategy Director, Tanvi Singh.

But as well as going broad, the campaign turned to targeting – not straightforward, per Singh and Tzintzis – because how do you target the vaccine hesitant?

“I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t easy. There’s no pre-defined Roy Morgan segment, which is why we initially went back to marketing science 101 of reaching all category buyers, for want of a better term,” says Tzintizis.

But as pockets of lagging vaccine rates emerged – geographic and demographic – the campaign could plug into those data points and start targeting those areas, per NAB’s Ben Abdellaziz.

Weaponising warriors

Meanwhile, the social aspect of the campaign turned the vocal minority into an accelerant.

“To measure how the campaign was really working out, social was a great proof point. As much as we could see the negative comments – and as much as that makes you nervous – on the other hand, engagement rates were really, really good and there was a lot of organic engagement coming in,” says Singh.

“So the negative comments – the keyboard warriors – actually helped us get the posts to go almost viral, and those conversations really helped to pull in the vaccine-hesitant as well.”

Singh cites Instagram engagement rates of 27 per cent while “even on platforms like LinkedIn” the logo change post notched 200,000 organic impressions.  

Business booster

The net effect was a major lift in consideration for both customers and non-customers – as well as the main objective: get Australia out of lockdowns, which happened in November, ahead of a December target.

“Obviously we know it wasn't our ad or our work that got us straight across the line, but we know it helped – and that was the big one, what we set out to do” says Ben Abdellaziz. “In terms of our tracking, we had improved NAB's reputation by two percentage points by November 2021, the highest that we had seen in three years.”

No mean feat for a bank. Meanwhile, the campaign blew targets for consideration gains – eight percentage points for customers and six percentage points for non-customers – out of the water.

“We saw a 12 percentage point lift in consideration for customers and a nine percentage point lift in consideration for non-customers,” says Ben Abdellaziz, which has translated to material customer gains – while those threatening to switch banks in protest appear to have stayed put.

“The biggest [fear] for us was attrition, in particular because of the vocal keyboard warriors. It was all about ‘we're taking our business elsewhere, we're closing our accounts’. But looking back to that period, there was no meaningful lift in attrition at all. There was actually a meaningful uplift in customers gained," says Ben Abdellaziz, "in the thousands”.

The upshot

The NAB brand chief thinks JAB’s legacy will be to convince the bank to hold firm in the face of potential blowback when it comes to taking a stand via brand.

“The key takeout for me has been for upcoming campaigns, don't let a vocal minority get in the way of important work. If it's the right thing to do, you need to be doing it. Standing up for what you believe in is important and declaring that support in public places is important,” says Ben Abdellaziz. “You might be viewed as tokenistic, but at the end of the day, it only takes a single person or brand to start a groundswell.”

He says standing firm from a marketing investment perspective will also apply in the face of any incoming economic slowdown.

“You hold the line. It's always about a two-speed plan. So for us, both the long [brand] and the short [performance]. You don't trade one off for the other. It's about the sales today and the sales tomorrow. So your investment in the long today will serve you down the line … it’s generating the demand and harvesting the demand,” per Ben Abdellaziz.

“So even though we know short-termism is rife, in particular in challenging times, I think people in my position and others, we must combat that … Because short-termism doesn't serve your brand in the long-run.”

So NAB will be keeping its brand to performance investment ratios, come what may?

“I think for ourselves and for others it should remain the same or in these uncertain times, actually swing more towards brand to be frank and play that ESOV strategy,” says Ben Abdellaziz.

The $64m question – literally – is whether the executive committee holds the same view.

“The debate will always be there and to be honest, that's not going to change. Is the proof in the pudding and do you have the runs on the board?," says the brand boss. "Luckily enough, within organisations like ours and others, this isn't new. We've been through this before and so [holding the media investment line is about] making sure that the organisation understands what's right for the business – and I think we've proven time and again that it is the ‘and’ [brand building and performance marketing] that gives us the best results.”