The
Brief

Nationwide were to officially become the ‘last branch in town’ in Windsor.

Our brief was to create a newsworthy activation that shone a spotlight on Nationwide and its commitment to communities across the UK, highlighting its branch promise to keep physical branches in towns until 2028 at least.

The
Solution

/ PR

/ Experiential

/ Content

/ Social

To promote Nationwide’s status as the Last Branch in Town in Windsor, Hatch activated a campaign to launch a new community initiative – the Windsor Community Fund – pledging to donate £200 into a fund on behalf of residents who open an account.

Hatch approached fellow Windsor ‘one and only’, Chesney Hawkes, to arrange an in-branch event which saw Chesney perform his iconic “The One And Only” song live, exclusively for Nationwide Windsor members!

We arranged exclusive national media interviews, and invited wider media to the event itself. Interviews with Nationwide stakeholders were conducted to ensure key messaging was delivered.

In-branch, voting boxes were installed for residents to decide how the fund would be spent. The winning choice was a pocket garden, with funding now delivered to Windsor Lions to bring this to life.

Hatch’s role was to deliver the event in a way that drove press coverage and media interest on both a national and local level, as well as producing content that would garner engagement on social media.

We worked alongside a media agency and creative agency throughout this project, to ensure that where creative was concerned, our assets and event branding were developed in alignment with the new Nationwide branding, TV advert and media buying design. We collaborated closely to ensure out-of-home activation aligned with campaign messaging and that locations of chosen activations would provide PR opportunities for us.

Challenges Overcome:

• Hosting a live music performance inside a building society branch hasn’t happened before! The venue is not set-up to hold a crowd of that size, nor provide the ideal acoustics to deliver the best show, all of which had to be meticulously planned for with a variety of contingency plans
• Collaborating with all parties to ensure that the event (subject to Chesney’s schedule) would align with the ATL campaign and wider marketing activity
• Safety – keeping the event under wraps while ensuring we had a full house meant that safety was very important. We needed to avoid over-crowding, ensure brand fire regulations were maintained, and provide security should we draw a crowd on the day

Insight:

At Hatch, we’ve developed a proprietary audience insight function, Mockingbird, which allows us to understand our audiences, their behaviours and their preferences on a granular level. We implemented this on this project to define which media they engaged with, social channel preferences, their values and more.

We initially used this insight in the creative ideation phase, to ensure that using Chesney would resonate with the wider Nationwide customer database, and with Windsor residents specifically.

Further insight was then implemented into our strategy; prioritising local and regional media with added national for scale (Daily Mail and Express as audience preferences), and delivering content specific to Instagram and Facebook.