Barclaycard teams up with Buzzfeed and Snapchat as it eyes millennial market
British payment firm Baclaycard is celebrating its 50th birthday this year but that doesn't mean it isn't trying to woo younger customers.
Barclaycard says it wants to find out the nation's 'musical DNA'
As part of a push designed to mark the occasion, and celebrate its longstanding partnership with Hyde Park's British Summer Time music festival, the finance brand has turned to BuzzFeed and Snapchat for an integrated, and personalised, marketing push.
Centered around the idea of a 'Great British Music Showdown,' Barclaycard is launching a UK-wide search to discover the nation’s 'musical DNA'.
In partnership with BuzzFeed, the company will carry out the biggest-ever search of its kind, asking users to complete an online quiz to reveal their own personal musical 'makeup', which will then be used along with other individual's responses to assess Britain's musical DNA region-by-region, be it indie, new romantic, hip-hop or otherwise.
BuzzFeed readers who complete the quiz will receive a personalised animated avatar, or 'dancebot' to represent which musical tribe they belong to.
The nation’s results will be updated on the site every twenty-four hours and the final DNA of the nation will be revealed at the end of July.
On choosing to work with BuzzFeed, the Barclaycard's chief marketing officer Katherine Whitton told The Drum that there was no choice for the brand but to approach them.
"Really there was no question for us apart from the fact we wanted to work with them," she said, adding that the publisher was not just a host, but became "part and parcel of the marketing ecosystem" when pulling the push together – assisting with data, the creation of the dancebots and helping create questions for the quiz element of the campaign.
The campaign was created by AKQA in partnership with Brighton-based creative studio, Bliink.
Gamifying shopping
At the heart of the brand's 50th birthday celebrations is a TV ad focusing on Britain's shopping habbits, which was supported by a separate digital game the Great British Shopping Showdown' to find out more about the shopping habbits of UK consumers.
Described by Whitton as a the "tinder of shopping", the game pits classic British buys against one another in a quick-fire quiz.
Both games let users share their picks and results across Facebook and Twitter, with Whitton admitting that while the brand has been "committed" to social for a long time, it wanted to steer away from "self serving" congratulatory birthday campaigns and "take it to another level to create entertainment through digital channels" while focusing on the role the company plays in everyday UK life.
Adding Snapchat into the mix
While Whitton was clear that people of all ages are invited to take part in the push, the 'Great British Music Showdown' is clearly skewed towards a younger audience, with half of BuzzFeed's 200 million monthly visitors aged between 18 to 34 -years-old.
To add to this, the brand will also be one of the first financial firms in the UK to stump up for a Snapchat ad.
Starting from tomorrow (2 July) it will make use of Snapchat's updated Snap Ads offering, which consolidates the messaging app's 3V products (vertical, video and views) to create interactive action-oriented units.
Of Snapchat's recent beefed up ad offering, Whitton asserted that she thinks the platform is doing "some really, really exciting things that allow brands to engage in a really authentic way".