Someday your identification documents will live virtually — and not in your wallet.
Digital identification is a means to authenticate ourselves without resorting to physical documents. It’s safe, it’s fast, and it can be used for everything from online commerce to renewing a driver’s licence.
The Canadian public is open to the concept, but many have reservations about security. This creates a need for education.
For decision-makers, meanwhile, the potential and promise of digital ID aren’t always top of mind, so the issue needs to be elevated to their attention.
Enter Interac, Canada’s leading, trusted name in digital payments. Interac is the brand that Canadians associate with debit transactions and peer-to-peer money movement, and is poised to take a leading role in digital ID as well. Our aim is to become as synonymous with digital authentication as we are with digital payments. With leadership from Interac, Canada will become a global example of what digital ID can accomplish.
In 2019, our task was to place Interac at the centre of the digital ID conversation
Interac laid the groundwork for its foray into digital ID with an integrated campaign that had three clear objectives: to educate consumers, to establish Interac as a thought leader in a nascent industry, and to connect with potential partners to form relationships that will help Interac assume a leadership role in the space.
These efforts built momentum through the year, and culminated in the November announcement of the acquisition of 2Keys, a well-connected startup with strong expertise in digital ID and security — a move that will allow Interac to build on its expertise and deliver digital ID solutions for governments, financial institutions and commercial clients.
The campaign consisted of:
The animated hero video How will digital identity work? was a highlight of the content strategy, and the centrepiece of the campaign from a social media standpoint. An upbeat, compelling animation, it answers a simple and important question, “What is digital identity?” The video was designed to be accessible to a wide range of audiences, but sophisticated enough to attract the interest of the expert audiences with whom we need to build relationships.
To connect with our chosen audiences for our strategic content, we amplified it with a paid campaign.
We connected with key B2B and government decision-makers via LinkedIn. This was the ideal forum for reaching the most influential government and business figures in this conversation because LinkedIn is the most trusted social platform for thought leadership: 40% of users visit in order to learn and gain insight from leaders and experts.
We also amplified some digital ID content to the general Canadian population via Taboola, to help raise public awareness of digital ID as an issue and begin to generate a chorus for change.
The Interac digital ID campaign resonated with Canadians across the country, in English- and French-language markets — and with modest budgets that reflect Canada’s relatively small size compared to the United States (our population is around 37 million, or one-ninth the size, and is divided between two main languages).
English-language performance on LinkedIn: 747,000 impressions and 2,366 total clicks for our content, including two articles and the animation How will digital identity work? The animation garnered 443,000 impressions and 129,000 views alone.
We also created a mass targeting campaign via Taboola for four articles, each promoted in English and French versions; it generated a total 2.4 million impressions and 2,800 clicks.
Arguably the most important results were engagements that aren’t easily quantifiable. Search engines registered a spike in “digital ID” searches that coincided with the campaign. We generated a number of social media engagements and interactions with senior-level decision-makers and stakeholders. Ultimately, we accomplished our goal of advancing the conversation around digital ID in Canada — and put Interac at the centre of that discussion.
