Writing on the wall: how Klarna's interactive murals busted myths and built brand love

Kinetic, Bountiful Cow and Motel created a campaign for Klarna that won the ‘Visual Craft’, ‘Interactive’, and ‘Best Interconnected OOH Formats’ categories at The Drum Awards for Out of Home in 2021. With visually stunning murals and an engaging online component, this activation helped build trust in the brand, as well as attracting new users. Here, the team behind the entry explains how it all came together.

Murals by artist Ignasi Monreal attracted new annd existing users to engage with Klarna's mythbusting challenge.

“In the last few years, our brand has been on an incredible journey in the UK. We created a new way for UK consumers to shop online and can proudly call ourselves the true Pay later pioneers. Since the launch, we have fought hard and been determined to grow the brand and we’ve come a long way; 14M users, over 13K onboarded retailers, and reaching a brand awareness of 70% (Gen Y/millennials). However, like any brand, also we face challenges. The biggest and most alarming one was that we saw incorrect assumptions being made about our products leading to misconceptions about our brand. Through this campaign, we took ownership of them, and in a bold act, set the record straight once and for all... and the UK shoppers Discovered the truth.” - Chris Norell, marketing manager, Klarna

Objectives

• Overturn the myths/misunderstandings about who Klarna are and the services they offer

• Engage audiences, particularly 25 – 44 shoppers, with the Klarna brand

Strategy

To raise awareness of a relatively unknown and misunderstood brand, Klarna needed a media solution that would disrupt, educate but more importantly connect at a deeper level with the target audience.

Klarna had been monitoring conversations about its business, both online and in the national papers. It was not good news, as negative misconceptions about its brand and services were widespread. They identified seven myths which were gaining the most traction – these included ‘Klarna is a scam’, ‘Klarna are targeting innocent millennials’ to the more unusual ‘Klarna is a female sanitary product!’.

Klarna needed to tackle this head on – quash the misconceptions and raise awareness of the type of service that they offered. To garner trust and change perceptions, it would not be as simple as telling its audience the mistruths. They invited them to find out for themselves and ‘Discover the truth’ about the brand.

In a move quite unexpected for a finance brand, they partnered with renowned artist Ignasi Monreal to create a mythical world of Klarna which could be entered by playing an interactive myth busting game. This was brought to life through art and the perfect fusion of public and private media – OOH and Mobile. The OOH was located within the largest 4 cities within the UK – London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool – ensuring high reach of the target audience. OOH was used as the gateway to the mythical world inviting people to take part in Klarna’s myth busting challenge.

To create maximum standout the largest real-world canvases were selected in the form of murals and the Waterloo domination to create a spectacular visual display in high footfall pedestrian areas. Each location was individually designed with a bespoke painting by Ignasi Monreal depicting one of the seven Klarna myths and featuring a QR code which when scanned via a mobile device would transport people to the online gallery and game.

Facts about Klarna were hidden within each virtual painting, which when uncovered could to lead to prizes.

Directional chalk stencils were used in proximity to each piece of real-world urban art, which worked with social media, to drive footfall to the murals and encourage further online interaction.

The real world and virtual galleries worked in perfect unison to display the stunning artwork and create an entertaining, interactive experience which both educated its target audience on the benefits of Klarna and built trust.

Results

The results were as spectacular as the paintings themselves! Across a 4-week period, the seven OOH paintings generated over 160,000 visits to the online gallery and 45,000 people dispelled all seven myths. More importantly brand trust increased significantly during the campaign period, according to Brand Vue FS.

These incredible engagement rates prove that with stunning eye catching creative, OOH can build, deliver interaction at scale and be a powerful gateway to digital content and customer conversion.

This campaign was a winner at The Drum Awards for Out of Home. To find out more, including which competitions are currently open for entry, visit The Drum Awards website.