Best Investment Online Ad

Investec’s brand positioning is ‘Out of the Ordinary’ which they use through all aspects: from their financial products through to how they advertise. When The Times made the bold move of becoming the first newspaper in the UK to charge to access its content, Investec saw this as an opportunity to advertise on their site on this ‘Out of the Ordinary’ occasion. Although The Times and Investec operate in very different businesses, The Times’ main focus was to make content better and to differentiate it from other news sites which is very similar to the way Investec differentiate itself through providing a service that is ‘Out of The Ordinary’. The overall creative idea “Live wires” was translated through the integration of live RSS feeds within the ad. Rather than simply providing a way to view these feeds, we created a texture mask of live RSS feeds that was superimposed on footage of the “Zebra” brand icon. This resulted in a very interesting effect where the zebra appeared to be made out of live text. The great technical challenge was to channel 22 live RSS feeds from 14 different web locations which needed to be ordered, sorted and pulled together into one continuous text stream. This was achieved by customising the ad-server’s technical components and using a relatively new service called Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo Pipes allowed us to pull all the feeds together and also to apply all sorts of filters to change the way they were displayed. The service also allowed us to exclude feeds containing certain negative words or topics, which were not reflective of the creative idea and brand image.

Contributors:

GRAVITY GLOBAL

Location: UK