The success of Barclaycard’s
‘Waterslide’ contactless payment promotional campaign, already a
major hit courtesy of a popular television advertisement in the UK,
has been taken a step further by Barclays’ decision to extend the
brand across digital platforms, and in particular the Apple iPhone.
Dan Jones
reports
Barclaycard’s Waterslide promotional campaign, originally launched
in late 2008 as a means of promoting its line of contactless debit
and credit cards, has been one of the most successful financial
services advertising campaigns in recent memory, with 9 million
consumers having engaged with the campaign in the online space
alone.
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The Waterslide Extreme iPhone game, launched
in July this year, immediately captured consumers’ attention in the
UK by garnering some 32,000 downloads in its first day, making it
the most downloaded free application (app) for the handset
(see RBI 616). This has ultimately
translated into over six million downloads and a number one free
application ranking in 57 countries worldwide.
Paul Troy, head of advertising and sponsorship
at Barclaycard, told RBI that the game had “massively exceeded”
expectations.
“If I was optimistic I would have thought we’d
have had a million downloads, and that would be if I was being
really optimistic. If just shows that if you have great content
then people actually engage with it,” he said.
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By GlobalDataBarclays is now thought to be working on a
group-wide strategy to be implemented next year, but for now is
continuing to focus its efforts on the Waterslide app campaign.
The bank brought out an updated version on 29
September, featuring updated game play; the option for users to
listen to iTunes music while playing; and the chance for users to
add high scores to a global scoreboard.
Barclaycard’s existing digital strategy has
also seen it use online video to promote the game, offering a
demonstration version and competitions to customers on its YouTube
channel, resulting in user-generated video versions of the game and
participation from over one million people.
Nonetheless, the sheer extent of the game’s
global reach has come as something of a surprise: Waterslide
Extreme has reached the top of the free application charts in
countries where Barclays has not launched its contactless ad
campaign, such as Germany and the US. The game has proved highly
popular in “any big market where you have strong iPhone
penetration, but also smaller ones too,” said Troy.
That is important for Barclaycard, given the
extent to which its international business has been expanding over
the past 18 months. In the 12 months to 30 June 2009 Barclaycard
witnessed a 46 percent increase in non-UK customer numbers,
including a 36 percent increase in the US, with total customer
numbers rising from 8.1 million to 11.8 million.
Greatest penetration in the
UK
The main focus for the campaign,
however, remains the original target market of the UK, and it is
here that the Waterslide game has achieved its greatest market
penetration.
Waterslide was number one on the UK’s free
application store for a total of three weeks, an impressive feat
given the regularity with which new applications are launched and
hence replace each other at the top of the chart.
“In terms of consideration levels, we haven’t
seen numbers this high in five years, if ever. The gap between us
and our competitors has only widened during the current recession,”
said Troy. “Waterslide has been the most successful Barclaycard
campaign ever, and it has made the brand famous again.
“People until very recently spoke about UK
actor Rowan Atkinson’s ad work with us despite it being 20 years
old now [so popular was the campaign that Atkinson’s character was
eventually used as the central character in a feature film version,
albeit one unrelated to the Barclays brand]. Now they’re talking
about Waterslide, which is great because it opens it up to a new
generation.”
Indeed, Apple itself has said that Waterslide
Extreme is “the most successful free application they’ve ever had
in any category”, according to Troy, who added that reaching the
top of the free application chart was almost certainly a first for
a product related to the financial services industry.
Moving forward, Barclaycard is already at work
on a sequel to Waterslide, likely be launched in the first quarter
of 2010. The success of Waterslide both in the UK and further
afield has prompted the business to reconfigure its promotional
strategy to be truly cross-platform from the outset, with an iPhone
game set to debut at the same time as the new campaign rather than
leveraging the promotion at a later date.
Contactless payments will continue to form a
central part of any new campaign but other new products, which
could potentially include an m-banking service, are also candidates
to be featured.
“With Waterslide, we’ve engaged 9 million
people digitally both online and through the iPhone – that’s as
many people as would see a primetime Waterslide television advert,”
said Troy.
“This a huge step-change for the business, and
it means for the sequel we’re starting with a digital audience of 9
million from the off. I think this time we can rack that up to 20
million.”
