The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2020
Westpac sells its 3% youth saver by celebrating young Aussies' weird side hustles
DDB Sydney replaced money lectures with animated films of pug chauffeurs and rooftop shoe retrievers; the campaign opened 532,328 new savings accounts.
Westpac · DDB Sydney
What it had to solve
From July 2020 Westpac offered young Australians an ongoing 3% savings rate, well above what rivals paid. The real problem was a generation that ignored bank advertising: lecturing them about thrift would only confirm that the category had nothing to say to them.
How it works
In 2020 Westpac gave young Australians a market-leading 3% savings rate, but pricing was not the hard part. The brief was to get a generation that tunes out bank advertising to open an account at all — and to get them excited about Westpac, not just its interest rate.
DDB Sydney's research flipped the usual assumption. Young Australians were not bad savers; they were earning in strange, inventive ways, from chauffeuring pugs between cities to retrieving lost shoes from rooftops. So instead of lecturing them on how to save, the agency decided to celebrate how they made money, partnering with six young animators to bring real side hustles to life in bold 15-second social films, GIFs, banners, website takeovers and Tinder placements.
The social-first push dropped the bank's traditional TV look entirely. The payoff was what Westpac called a major impact: the campaign smashed targets for new customers and new accounts, with the team reporting 21,000 first-time young customers and 532,328 new savings accounts opened.
Why it lands
- Starting from the insight that young people already save and earn in inventive ways made the audience the hero of the story, not the problem to be fixed.
- Celebrating side hustles — pug chauffeurs, rooftop shoe retrievers — was inherently shareable content rather than an ad interrupting people.
- Going social-first and dropping the usual TV look signaled that the bank was talking to this generation on its own turf.
- Partnering with young animators gave the campaign a visual language that could not be confused with category cliches.
What it did
The campaign smashed Westpac's targets for new customers and new accounts; the team reported 21,000 young Australians joining Westpac for the first time and 532,328 new savings accounts opened.
What you can take
To sell money products to young people, start from respect: celebrating how they already earn outperforms lecturing them on how to save, and looking nothing like a bank is part of the product.
Since then
The campaign ran through 2020 and was later logged in D&AD's awards archive as 'However You Make it, We'll Help You Save it.' Its reported results — tens of thousands of first-time young customers and more than half a million new savings accounts — made it a reference point for banks trying to speak to younger savers, and Campaign Brief's 2021 hot list cited it among DDB's notable Australian work of the previous year.
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