Banking on Business Cable: First Union Bank

It is the sixth largest bank in the U.S. and the eighth largest brokerage house, but until last year, First Union Bank was hardly a household name. Frustrated by its low profile, it went to its two-year agency of record, Publicis & Hal Riney, which crafted the bank's first national TV effort.

The surreal image campaign, created by agency chairman Hal Riney, took a radical departure from the typical warm and fuzzy approach to branding banks. Another big shift came in the media plan, which eschewed the traditional route of direct mail and business print in favor of one heavy on cable TV.

Riney collaborated with George Lucas' visual-effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, to create Financial World, a series of four 60-second spots in which business-suited masses churn around skyscrapers made of financial symbols in a fantastical, Metropolis-like city on a continent shaped like a dollar sign.

The commercials portray a futuristic, macabre cityscape of bizarre financial icons, through which a huge, gleaming First Union tower rises above the disturbing chaos. Each spot winds up with the tagline: "Come to the mountain called First Union, or if you prefer, the mountain will come to you," spoken by Riney over an original score performed by theLondon Philharmonic.

Along with its break-out creative, First Union had some ambitious media goals. "Our job was to make First Union appear to be a major player in the financial industry quickly in areas where no market presence existed," says Doug Seay, Riney & Publicis senior vice president of TV buying.

First Union also wanted to be perceived differently from other financial institutions, so it had to behave differently, he says. "The whole story was about their scale, so we wanted impact."

As they were building the media plan, Seay and his team looked at how big brands like Coca Cola, Visa and Anheuser-Busch had built their national images. They found a common denominator had been using TV, including national sporting events. A key for First Union's campaign, however, lay not just in reaching a broad audience but the top three percent of the U.S. population in terms of income, a difficult assignment for broad-based TV or mass media. "The conventional wisdom for financial institutions was to use business print and direct mail to target high-end investors," Seay says, "but our mission statement called for a high-impact environment. One of the things we realized is that cable TV is an extraordinary way to brand and we needed to do it in a big way."

On broadcast TV, Seay and his team picked must-see TV shows, such as major sporting events, the Academy and Tony awards shows, primetime news and Sunday morning news shows and more than anything else, business cable.

On cable, they bought time during the upfront season on CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, MSNBC, Fox News and A&E, using a variety of different kinds of programming to catch investors at different points in their day. Buys on CNN included primetime, plus early morning shows like Business Day, and Sports Tonight, as well as business shows like Moneyline.

"We did stock market updates and we bought a lot of CNN Newsstand," Seay recalls. On CNBC, First Union spots appeared in Today's Business, Squawk Box, Power Lunch and Market Wrap, as well as other shows and on MSNBC, commercials aired during Morning Line, Time and Again, Imus and InterNight. Fox News Channel shows included Financial World, O'Reilly Factor, Cavuto Business Report, The Crier Report and Hannity and Colmes.

With many of the cable buys, Seay and his team bought sponsorship positions and billboards along with their schedules. "The idea of running more than one unit and billboards is an effective way to brand and makes you look like a big player," Seay says. "The tune-in and tune-out factor in cable is quite large. People don't sit and watch a solid hour of news. They try to capture news while they are on the run. So for us to buy multiple units of a show is an effective way to high-churn the environment and not get overkill.

Initially, Seay and his team wanted to focus on primetime in cable, but they learned they could effectively reach First Union's target audience in lots of dayparts.

"We found it's better to buy CNN, for instance, without any preconceived notions of what constitutes prime," Seay says. "The Wall Street types want to know how the financial markets are doing before they get into work. We found that early morning daypart an excellent way to reach that three percent we needed to reach."

Along with buying news, business news and sports programming, First Union chose some cable entertainment shows. An association with A&E's Biography series included on-air spots and a tie-in with the magazine.

Research showed national awareness of First Union tripled in the first few months of the campaign, and Riney is working on five more spots to use this year.

"Cable provided us the opportunity to hone in on the upscale viewer," Seay says. "It's a testament to cable that if you have a branding campaign, cable can effectively deliver that high-end audience that conventionally is found only in print for the financial, banking and insurance industry."