M&C Saatchi

Client: CommBank
Product: CommBank App
Title: The App within the App
Media: Social (Facebook)
Country: Australia
Date Of Campaign: 31.01.2020

Background: The CommBank app is Australia’s #1 banking app. It’s intuitive, simple to use and uses powerful AI to track and predict your financial behaviour - and it's the single most important tech product for the Commonwealth Bank. But customers from other banks couldn’t experience it. They couldn’t download it, and their friends couldn’t show them their app without revealing personal financial records. Which led us to the problem - how can you be interested in a product you’ll never be able to try out? How could we get this powerful financial tool into the hands of non-CommBank customers?

Idea: In 2020, we did something that no-one had done before, we replicated the CommBank app on social media. With the help of Facebook, we found a way to take their Playable ad standards and push them to the limit. The playable app needed to be completely self-contained, without any asset streaming or connection to third-party servers. We also had to take a 138MB application and squeeze it into a 2MB web experience. That meant leveraging highly optimised inline encoded assets, minimal libraries and aggressive minifying to meet the 2MB requirement. And on the 31st January 2020, the app went live on Facebook. For the first time, potential customers could now test drive a functioning CommBank banking app within their Facebook app. This meant they could now compare our banking app to theirs - and see just how good mobile banking could be. It allowed users to customise its settings, change the background, even deep dive into account personalisation settings.

Results: In just one week, the playable app received 2.5 million brand engagements - that’s 70% of the target market. Over 47,000 people used the playable app, with 6,256 clicking through to the CommBank site to find out how to get it. In fact, the click through rates were five times more effective than any other non-playable ad on the Facebook platform - with message association ten times that of category norms. But more importantly, thousands of potential customers could finally compare our banking app to theirs. And that’s how a simple tech problem became one of CommBank’s most powerful acquisition solutions.