The Commonwealth Bank is launching a five-year, $40m project to help improve the “financial literacy” of Australian children, supported by the latest work from US agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners.
The bank said the scheme, called onemillionkids, will target one million Australian children and provide a “reinvigoration” of its existing school banking programme.
Alongside the onemillionkids work, Commonwealth Bank is also expanding its StartSmart financial literacy seminars, currently held in high schools, to primary schools.
Since the StartSmart workshops began in 2007, they have reached more than 100,000 high school students. The move into primary schools is intended to reach a further 60,000 children.
The school banking work will be supported with a “substantial” marketing campaign including a 45-second TVC by Goodby Silverstein & Partners.
Following on from the series of ads that show the bank’s marketers meeting an inept American ad agency, the ad will show the fictional agency meeting a group of six-year-olds in an Australian primary school.
Unsurprisingly, the agency fails to meet the brief in communicating with the children and the marketing team underlines the importance of the bank’s work in schools. The work follows the recently launched version of the campaign introducing “The determined to please and possibly astonish service promise”.
The project is the latest incarnation of CBA’s efforts towards educating kids, with many people’s first experience of banking being the bank’s Dollarmite accounts.
Ralph Norris, CEO of Commonwealth Bank, said: “onemillionkids will be an important platform for the Group to build and link all its activities targeted at young people, whether they are Commonwealth Bank customers or not, under a common goal where kids, parents, teachers and others interested in driving financial literacy in Australia will be able to learn, interact, have fun and contribute.
“onemillionkids is the starting point for our determination to support a more financially literate future generation. It is the commitment that underpins all of our current activities and the foundation from which we will continue to evolve existing programs and develop new initiatives.”
