‘Nothing beats’ AI monotone in BMEOF’s new Bankwest campaign
Bankwest has launched a new brand platform, reintroducing itself to the market after its digital transformation, via Bear Meets Eagle on Fire.
Bankwest completed its transition to a fully digital bank last month — after closing its remaining physical branches in Australia — with the launch of a new app and website.
The new campaign, which kicked off Sunday, marks the start of a new chapter for the brand, according to BMEOF’s founder and CCO, Micah Walker.
“You don’t take a brand that’s been around for as long as Bankwest has and solve everything in just one campaign,” he said. “It’s important to remember that this is the beginning. This is the start of a new chapter for the brand. We’re just kicking it off, setting up that core idea and demonstrating it across these spots.”
‘Just Enough Bank’ features three spots focusing on the idiosyncratic things people can turn their attention to, rather than spending their time banking.
The campaign caters to a more grown-up audience — adults who manage family or household banking — playfully showing them that “only 0.02% of your time” can be spent doing “bank things”, leaving time to take stress out on strangers, eat cheese in bed, or make power moves in the office.
Walker said most banking advertising puts itself right at the forefront, so BMEOF wanted to take a different approach, showing a “more contemporary” version of what a bank should be.
“What we wanted to do was point out a bank that is intuitive and smart enough to do exactly what you need without making your life more complicated than it already is,” he said.
“Then the twist on it is that we know everybody would rather really do anything than spend time on banking, and that’s kind of it.”
Essentially, the agency didn’t want to hold up a mirror to people’s lives, Walker said, but instead, and in a more creative way, highlight the idiosyncratic and varied things people could do.
The hero spots feature an AI voiceover, which Walker said juxtaposes with the “emotional” visuals. While it was not a set idea from the start, BMEOF found that nothing beat the monotone, unattached audio.
“We initially had fun trying to find a voice that was more scientific than emotional. We were working with and curating the AI voice, not because of the technology, but because it just happened to have the characteristic that worked for us,” Walker told Mumbrella.
“The one we used is quite disconnected, dispassionate, and everyone just fell in love with it. We’d try to get other voices to recreate the same type of feeling, but nothing ever did.”
Another large aspect of the launch campaign is the OOH visuals, which feature a new colour palette, moving Bankwest away from the iconic orange that has been in market for so long.
“We’re trying to give them a new, distinctive palette to work across,” Walker told Mumbrella.
“The problem with the old one was that there are competing brands that use the same colours. And also, when someone does something one way for so long, you can get trapped. There were aspects of this brand look and feel that had grown a little tired. And it was time to reintroduce it in a way that made it feel more contemporary.”
He said there was a “whole conversation” around colour, with the agency honouring the orange, while establishing the wider palette and bringing it all to life.
“It’s easy to look at that stuff and think you can’t change, but then you ultimately get stuck,” Walker said. “So we were lucky that when we started speaking to [Bankwest], they didn’t know how to change exactly, but they knew they had to.”
Walker said more assets will launch in the coming weeks and months, as the platform has a “never-ending nature” to it.
“We’re not stuck with a structure,” he told Mumbrella. “It can grow and expand and evolve.”
In a media release sent on Monday, Bankwest’s GM of customer, marketing, and communications, Jodene Murphy, said: “It’s early stages in the roll out of this new platform, but right from the outset, we loved the confidence and distinctiveness of the work BMEOF brought us.”
The first iteration of the campaign is live across broadcast, online video, OOH, digital, social, and cinema.
Credits:
Client: Bankwest
Creative Agency: Bear Meets Eagle On Fire
Media Agency: EssenceMediacom
Production Company: 3&7
Director: Steve Ayson
Producer: Allison Lockwood
Director of Photography: Adam Stone
Production Designer: Ruby Matthews
Post Production: ARC
Editor: Peter Sciberras
2nd Editor: Harrison Carr
Colour: Trish Cahill
Online: Eugene Richards
Sound House: Rumble Studios
Lead Sound Designer: Tone Aston
Sound Designer: Daniel William
Sound EP: Michael Gie
Music Supervision: Trailer Media
Music Supervisor: Anton Trailer
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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topics
BankWest
Bear Meets Eagle on Fire
BMEOF
brand platform
Campaign
creative
Jodene Murphy
Just Enough Bank
Micah Walker
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