A felt fedora, whip and gun tell you it’s Indiana Jones, sure, but the monkey and the dates are the real clues that this is about Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Those iconic props key to a recent ad run by Scotiabank on Instagram as part of the brand’s”Guess The Movie” campaign.
In total, the bank and its agency, Bensimon Byrne, have created eight ads that tease famous films. The campaign rolls into Scotiabank’s ongoing Scene initiative, a wide-spread loyalty program and partnership with Cineplex that includes broadcast ads, an app, concerts and sponsorships and a branded debit card.
Scotiabank has also created Instagram ads celebrating other fan favourites, like Mean Girls and Cast Away. Since it started running the ads two weeks ago, Scotiabank has seen a spike in new followers, jumping to 1,500 from 1,200. It will continue to run the creative, both as paid and organic posts, through the middle of February.
Clinton Braganza, senior vice-president of marketing at Scotiabank, told Marketing the campaign is one of two recent ventures into paid media on Instagram for the bank. The first was a series of “life hacks” posts aimed at students that the brand ran as ads throughout fall.
Braganza said the posts caught on with the target, which is why the brand continues to organically re-post life hacks consumers have posted on Instagram since the campaign ended. The brand sees Instagram as a way to get in front of 18 to 24-year-olds, who Braganza said can be hard to reach on other platforms.
Scotiabank has been on Instagram since July 2013 and started adding paid media to its efforts on the platform last fall shortly after Instagram rolled out its ad offering in Canada. It’s already seeing the impact paid media has on engagement on the platform. On the Indiana Jones post, for example, the brand initially garnered 40 likes and 21 comments when it posted it with no media spend. When an identical post went out as an ad, it pulled in 1,763 likes and 149 comments.
Though the ads test consumers’ movie knowledge, they’re purely content, not a contest. Because the brand is still testing Instagram as a paid platform, Braganza said the company wanted to know “people were engaging with the content because they liked it [not] for the opportunity to win a prize.” However, he said the brand is considering adding a contest layer into a future campaign it’s considering for spring.
For now, the brand is still testing the value of Instagram ads, but Braganza said the results have been promising enough to warrant additional investment – especially because the cost of ads on the platform is comparatively low.
“We’re still relatively young in this platform and we’re learning as we’re going,” he said. “There’s not a tremendous amount of upfront investment. From a cost perspective, it’s an initiative where we want to make sure we’re spending some money and gaining some learnings so we can determine going forward how much or how little [Instagram] will play into our broader marketing mix.”
Here’s a look at three more of Scotiabank’s Guess The Movie ads.
