Last year, American Express wanted to lead a conversation about financial inclusion in America – a unique challenge for a premium financial services institution. Having always been associated with exclusivity and privilege, they began to change that perception with a new reloadable, prepaid product, Serve, and a banking alternative, Bluebird with Walmart. However, these products alone were not enough to shift the perception of the brand. With this in mind, American Express sought to use the brand's power to raise awareness for a growing issue in the United States: financial exclusion.
American Express enlisted the help of theAudience and TAG, a division of Participant Media, to help make and distribute a documentary that shed light on the nearly 70MM financially underserved in America, who often relied on check cashers and payday lenders to survive.
Debuting on YouTube, a free, all-inclusive social media platform, Spent: Looking For Change has garnered 12MM views and a 97% positive sentiment rating since its debut on June 4th, 2014. To further the reach of the film, theAudience utilized its vast network of celebrity and platform influencers to distribute the film on social. To date, the entire Spent campaign has garnered 16MM video views, 126MM impressions, 1MM engagements and 1MM SpentMovie.com website views on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
In order to raise awareness for the issue of financial inclusion in America, American Express brought on TAG, a division of Participant Media, to secure Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim to executive produce and Derek Doneen to direct a documentary about the subject. They also enlisted theAudience and TAG to find the perfect narrator to tell this story, which was Tyler Perry, another prolific filmmaker who grew up financially underserved and passionate about financial inclusion.
The challenge was to separate the story from the brand. American Express wanted the documentary to focus on the issue of financial exclusion, not their brand or prepaid products. Instead, the purpose of this film was to raise awareness of this important issue and encourage Americans to get involved in the solutions.
The campaign began with teaser content on social shared through the American Express Serve social pages, but getting people to see the documentary was a bigger challenge. American Express decided to release the film's trailer at the SXSW film festival, a home of innovation and socially conscious films, in March 2014, and simultaneously unveiled the website www.SpentMovie.com, which eventually housed the film and all information on the subject. By generating buzz about the trailer on social through theAudience's vast network of social influencers, it garnered 1.3MM views on YouTube and 500K views on Facebook.
Using celebrity and platform influencers as distributors of Spent: Looking For Change opened the film up to a diverse and massive audience that may never have been reached through the Serve social pages alone. All together, influencers published 61 posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram resulting in 78MM impressions, 895K engagements and 237K bit.ly clicks to SpentMovie.com to date.
In conjunction with influencer posts on social, live screening events also increased national attention to the Spent campaign. A wide range of celebrities attended the Los Angeles film premiere, which took place on June 4th, 2014, the same day as the film's online debut. Holding #LookingForChange signs on the red carpet, these celebrities helped spread the word both in real time and on social. American Express worked with theAudience to enlist The Young Turks (TYT), the world's largest online news show, to debut the film on their YouTube page and host a live-stream Q&A with the film's executive producer and director, moderated by TYT's Cenk Uygur. Premiere day alone generated 106K engagements, 33.8MM impressions, 4.1MM video views and 25K SpentMovie.com views. @AmexServe Twitter coverage produced 1.1M impressions and 1.7K total mentions.
The LA premiere was so successful that a New York screening followed with more celebrity influencers in attendance. This time, American Express and The Huffington Post hosted a live-stream broadcast and Arianna Huffington moderated a panel discussion that included the film's narrator, Tyler Perry.
Utilizing social media influencers in this manner had rarely been done before, and American Express and theAudience employed other innovative techniques to get Spent out into the digital sphere. Capitalizing on Facebook's new algorithm changes that boosted video content natively uploaded to the platform, theAudience began seeding digestible snippets of Spent content on social, in the form of mini videos highlighting the individual stories of the Spent characters, to great success. Videos posted directly to Facebook were viewed over 700K times.
On Twitter, theAudience worked with the platform to create newly released website cards for influencers and the Serve page to use, which allowed fans to click a "Learn More" or "Watch More" button that would then direct traffic to Spent.com. These Twitter efforts resulted in 38MM impressions, with the hashtags #Spent and #LookingForChange being mentioned in 10K tweets. Influencer tweets alone generated 21MM impressions and 19K engagements.
The objective was to garner video views, but the results proved to be much more than that. Spent: Looking for Change has sparked more than 150 unique articles, including national coverage in USA Today and The New York Times, inspired an innovative financial education initiative in a rural high school in Mississippi, and has prompted government action with the passing of The American Savings Promotion Act.
The story of the financially underserved is far from over, but with 16MM video views, 126MM impressions, 1MM engagements and 1MM SpentMovie.com website views on multiple social platforms, American Express has kicked off the conversation and movement to provide more affordable and accessible financial solutions for all.
