The bank’s strength has traditionally been in rural areas, but the company has an eye on Indonesia’s key towns and cities after improving its infrastructure.
Matari’s brief was to create a campaign for BRI’s Britama savings account — and acquire customers quickly. The bank’s target audience was urban dwellers in 10 major cities, aged 15 years and above. The campaign, titled ‘Untung Beliung Britama’ (‘Lucky tornado Britama’), started off with a series of teasers, designed to resemble news reports, on television, print and radio.
The five print ads feature cars being stranded in the most unlikely of places: on the top of a tree, floating off the shores of Kuta beach in Bali and on the roof of a house. Meanwhile, TV and radio spots featured ‘news anchors’ reporting on the incidents.
Matari worked with Cyrus Production for the TV ads.
Each of the ads ran for only one day. There were no mentions of BRI or Britama although the name of the pseudo news programme was Brita Utama, — ‘main news’ — an abbreviation of Britama.
After five days, new ads were rolled out and the ‘news anchors’ revealed the cause of the strange phenomenon — the ‘Lucky tornado’ had blown the cars to their current locations. The commercials then closed with a call for the public to be ‘Korban bahagia’ (‘the happy victim’) by opening a BRI account.
Following that, a new TVC explaining the campaign was rolled out. “By the third week of the 16-week campaign, we have reached 93 per cent of the target audience and hit 31 per cent of the total target value of funds generated from new customers,” said Michael Sudarto, deputy president of Matari Advertising.
BRI is one of five Government-backed commercial banks in the country. It specialises in small to medium-sized businesses, which make up around 90 per cent of its clientele. The company claims to be the largest microfinance institution in the world, with more than 4,000 branches and 30 million depositors.
