First Fidelity Bank
First Fidelity Bank (FFB) worked tirelessly to secure over $180 million in Payment Protection Program (PPP) loans for over 1,800 small businesses in Oklahoma and Arizona in the beginning months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We needed to share the story of FFB’s hard work — sincerely, and in a way that differentiated FFB from other banks offering similar loans.
Our research gave us a key insight: with so much negativity and uncertainty in the world at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, our audience was receptive to messages that made them feel good. Our target audience of local, hardworking people wanted to hear about compassion, service, generosity, and humans helping other humans.
Big brands and especially the financial market were under heavy scrutiny regarding how they would handle this unprecedented situation. The FFB brand was being analyzed by its current and potential customers on “are they ‘for themselves’ or ‘for humanity and others'”?
Saxum created a strategy based on video testimonial stories featuring FFB’s PPP loan customers. Rather than focus entirely on FFB as the hero, we shifted the narrative – honoring small business owners as heroes, community pillars, and hard workers, and positioning FFB as a partner and friend to these customers. The result became a campaign called “FFB – As A Friend.”
We told the story of these testimonials with an integrated strategy that leveraged paid advertising, email and social media content, and a unique microsite — FFBfriend.com — that served as the home base for the testimonial videos.
The campaign produced big results over a concise six-week timeline — successfully reaching the Oklahoma City metro audience with videos and other creative assets to tell FFB’s PPP customer loan testimonial stories.
8.2k microsite sessions with an average duration of 1:24
$75k paid media strategy and investment resulted in:
