To celebrate its sponsorship of Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in February this year, ANZ commissioned artists to transform 10 ATMs into fabulous GAYTMs.

The move was an outstanding success for ANZ on many levels, exceeding all expectations. But it was also a graphic – and colourful – demonstration of how the world of social media is upending convention.

GAYTMs were a significant point of distinction for ANZ as a brand but also a huge step forward in terms of utilising social media at the very core of a marketing campaign. Moreover, from a societal perspective, it delivered a very important message about diversity, inclusion and respect; crucial elements of modern business success.

Aside from the 10 fabulous artworks themselves, it was the first time social channels were exclusively used to engage ANZ’s audiences for a full-scale campaign investment. To say it went viral would be an understatement.

The campaign created 62 million media impressions across 70 countries, with 90 per cent positive social sentiment. Five, or even two years ago, this sort of global reach and engagement with the public would have been difficult to imagine, especially for a bank.

It delivered ANZ the highest engagement rate of all Australian banks across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We attracted thousands and thousands of new customers in New South Wales. Staff feedback was outstanding, and in June, the campaign was awarded a Grand Prix in Outdoor at the 2014 Cannes Lions.

In my country being gay is illegal, but I want to send a message to the world that big corporations can actually change people’s views through advertising.

Tista Sen, Snr Vice President JWT India, Cannes Judge. 

THE KEY INGREDIENTS

The key ingredients of the GAYTM campaign were a brilliant idea, an uncompromised investment in quality and the courage, belief and passion to see it through, despite the – for a bank – revolutionary concept.

The brilliantly simple, creative idea came from a brief we put to our agency partner, Whybin\TBWA, to show our support of “diversity, inclusion and respect”.

ANZ has sponsored the Mardi Gras since 2007 but just this year we elevated our sponsorship to Principal Partner to demonstrate our commitment to the festival and diversity as a whole. With a brand promise to ‘live in your world’, what better way is there to demonstrate this than by having our ATMs coming out and being proud?

Once armed with the idea, we knew the GAYTMs themselves had to be dazzling to get the social traction we were aspiring for. This is all very well as an idea but I for one had never committed this amount of marketing spend to ten pieces of artwork before!

Our team had the courage to be controversial, the confidence to break media conventions and the passion to make it happen in a short period of time. So how did we manage to pull it off?

THE LESSONS

We learned five crucial lessons from the GAYTM campaign.

Be commercial

Corporate responsibility programs are usually run quite separately from mainstream marketing initiatives and usually have the corresponding budgets to match. 

For GAYTMs, we saw an opportunity to bring two separate business objectives together to make it happen.

We have an ongoing objective to engage the Sydney market and give more people an opportunity to experience the ANZ brand, often for the first time.  And we were a long-time supporter of the Mardi Gras as part of our corporate social responsibility program.

Put the two together and we had the investment case to bring GAYTMs to life.