An exchange of ideas

London-based foreign exchange specialist FC Exchange asked us for help to create a national ad campaign for both corporate and private clients to increase awareness of its offer and expertise in a crowded market. The campaign, running in a number of broadsheets, including The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times as well as a number of consumer lifestyle magazines, launched this month.

As well as increasing brand awareness and developing a campaign that reflected its offer of a fast, easy and secure service, FC Exchange also wanted to differentiate itself from the people focused approach used by its competitors. We retained personalisation by introducing quotes from FC Exchange’s staff and its financial director to highlight the benefits of the service.

We created two campaign headlines to differentiate the private and corporate offers. For corporate audiences we focused on services with the copyline, ‘make your money go further, faster’, and reinforced this messaging with the graphic arrow device from the company’s logo to create an iconic look and feel. We used the same device for private clients but introduced the new copyline, ‘why not save £9,332 on your currency transfers?’, focusing on the money customers can save over using a bank. This was backed up by market research, with new ads updated with the latest figures from ongoing research, the latest being in May.

We tailored the messaging further depending on the sector and publication, whilst the orange, grey and white colour palette provides visual intrigue and works across both corporate and private client audiences to build brand recognition and cross sell the business.

FC Exchange received a positive response to the first ads, which generated several good quality leads as well as some new corporate customers. These results highlighted to the company that less is more, and that a clean, simple message allows the reader to focus on the elements that matter most.

A TTP Partnership

Working in partnership with its clients, TTP combines the strengths of science, engineering and business development to bring new products to market. Having successfully tackled the sales presentation to communicate the key messages that differentiate TTP from its competitors, TTP now wanted to do the same externally and to a much wider audience through print advertising.

There was already an existing set of ads but these lacked clarity and branding, so the challenge was to create a suite of ads that were fresh and current, drew on TTP’s expertise in exploiting new technologies and which could be rolled out over a period of time.

So, we brainstormed a number of ideas to present to TTP, and then got to work developing the two chosen routes. We built on the look and feel that was established for the presenter, utilising the red blocks of the logo for brand continuity across both routes. One route features bold imagery of disruptive technologies with minimum copy, whilst the other features imagery that is more in the background with a bold typographic approach. This route also focuses on the idea of a ‘successful partnership’, which works across a business and recruitment perspective, as well as offering a direct link to the TTP brand.

TTP’s Dr Allan Carmichael was really pleased with our efforts, so a successful partnership indeed!