Quick, if you wanted to design a billboard that showed off how transparent your company was, how would you do it?
Well, if you’re anything like Capital One, UK, you’d do it by hiring a great design firm (Rise at Seven) to build you a transparent billboard which featured your new mostly transparent credit card.
Now granted, there is some verbiage on the billboard that mentions the company’s transparency, but honestly, even if there wasn’t, the transparent billboard would still convey the message. It does a lot of the heavy lifting, with the text acting mostly in a supporting role.
Let’s be honest, most of the time, credit card advertising isn’t all that fun, innovative or exciting. Sure, Capital One has, over the years, found a few ways to pleasantly surprise us, but as a rule, it’s just not something that leaves people eyes-agog and talking.
Except this time, it did.
Corporate transparency might not be as big a topic as, say, privacy, but it’s right up there, and very few companies are talking about their efforts to be more transparent. That fact, combined with the fact that it is very much on the mind of a large swath of consumers, combines to make Cap One’s latest ad campaign in the UK perfectly timed and devastatingly effective.
Even better, they’re on the leading edge of this trend and there’s plenty of room on the bandwagon. Just about any company in any industry can get in on the action and tout their own efforts at increasing transparency, turning that into a strategic advantage.
The simple truth is, increasingly, consumers want to know more about who they’re doing business with. Companies that try to obfuscate their practices will slowly fall behind those who are more open and transparent. That could be you and your company if you wanted it to be!
Even if you don’t – even if you decide transparency isn’t an angle you’re interested in pursuing, it’s exactly this kind of outside-the-box thinking that our company excels at. If you’re struggling to come up with your next big ad campaign concept, just give our office a call at 770-391-8528.