UBS - Star Manager

Manage your way to greatness

PROJECT SUMMARY

Thanks to social media, fans are closer to their idols than ever before. For the Swiss bank UBS, we highlighted this trend and launched a youth campaign focusing heavily on gamification and entertainment.

how it worked

We were looking for a manager to take care of the fictional teen pop star Kashton. Because like most modern pop stars, Kashton has everything: fame, style, thousands of fans - and problems. Anyone who accepted the challenge signed a management contract within our online game and was given a new problem each week by Kashton. Their choice often had surprising consequences. You decided to throw eggs at the papparazzi hounding him? Well that’s a shame because now his vegan fans are protesting. But if you threw tomatoes instead, you could have been the new face of a big tomato ketchup brand. This has either a positive or negative effect on the bonus the player earned, which with some luck was paid out to the manager at the end of the campaign.

CHALLENGES

The biggest challenge for this project was our target audience. To make a game for young people as a bank is challenging, because it’s not a brand this demographic finds engaging. A younger audience also brings a shorter attention span, so we had to make sure we got them coming back to the site every week.

SOLUTIONS

We really had to make sure our content was king throughout our UX. We had to make sure our engaging and humorous character was front and centre. The rest of our banking messaging then became secondary in our messaging hierarchy. But we made sure there were always subtle cues to sign up for a UBS banking account.

RESULTS

Over 17,000 young people played Star Manager. On average, they solved 6 out of 8 weekly problems - and shared the campaign over 21,000 times. And, compared to the previous year, 10.2% more bank packages were registered. This made Star Manager the most successful youth campaign in the history of UBS.

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