In a year of disruption, insecurity and adversity for the financial industry, Virgin Money achieved its primary goal to reinvent and reinvigorate its brand and customer experience through the transformative power of music.
Through a partnership with SSD Concerts to create the world’s first socially distanced music venue, Virgin Money earned international attention for helping bring LIVE music back to the UK with the Virgin Money Unity Arena. For a bank to be tweeted about by the Irish Taoiseach, talked about on social by Trevor Noah, Tom Grennan and TikTok influencers, make headlines in Lad Bible, Rolling Stone and NME, and become part of social meme and viral culture is extremely rare.
In the absence of a media budget, we created a viral social media campaign: Would ‘the world’s best-behaved outdoor gig’ (The Guardian) be the new reality for live music in the pandemic era? For some, it was their lifelong gig dream made reality. But not everyone agreed, and this meant the most engaged posts generated comments into many thousands. We helped create more buzz via ‘war-room’-style social outreach.
We organically drove overall impressions of 616 million, increased social brand sentiment by 21% (7% > 28% July – August) and social share of voice by 9%. On our owned channels, engagement on our Virgin Money Unity Arena posts was 85% higher than our benchmark.
The Virgin Money Unity Arena is one of this year’s unforgettable financial partnerships, firming us up in the public imagination as a bank with a difference.
