Halifax: Be smarter about your marketing money - Halifax student current accounts campaign 2008

This paper shows how in a quest to improve efficiency in 2008, Halifax set themselves the challenge of recruiting as many new student current account customers as the previous year, with approximately half the marketing budget. Starting university is seen as one of the key life events that triggers the need to open a current account and as a result there is strong competition between banks to capture the nation’s new students. The strategy involved shifting 80 per cent of media budget online, with the online campaign centred around the notion ‘Be smarter with your money’ and a film that exaggerated the mad things students do to get through university financially. Digital creative led all other communications from in-branch posters to direct mail. As a result, increased efficiency led to a payback of £2.36 per every £1 spent