Pierre du Plessis

Banking security is a very abstract and complex topic. As the bank that makes banking simple, we created a communication and content platform that brings our security promise to live across all touch points: Simply Secure.

Since nobody enjoys reading about banking security, we took some help from five fun and unexpected characters explaining five key security topics… simply!

In October 2021, N26 was suddenly faced with restrictions to the number of new customers we could onboard. To maintain our market-leading position, we quickly needed to find new ways of driving in-app engagement and loyalty among our existing customers.

We turned the month of November into the Month of N, unveiling a new N-themed activation every day across our European social, content, and CRM channels.

Over 26 days, we celebrated November birthdays, crowdsourced the ultimate Nineties playlist, created an augmented reality N26 necklace, launched our own Not Naked capsule collection, and gave away loads of nice prizes, including an all-expenses-paid trip to any place on earth starting with the letter N. The campaign smashed all of our objectives and trended on Twitter twice.

Results
+123% social engagement
+84% monthly active N26 app users
+173% in-app engagement

London International Awards: Silver and bronze
Cannes Lions: Bronze
New York One Show: 3 merit awards
Loerie Grand Prix, 3 gold, 2 silver awards
Bookmarks: 3 gold, 1 silver awards

Apparently babies crawl up to 3km in a day – that’s 21 adult-size kilometres. So when Huggies launched a range of nappies designed for active babies, this fact became the seed of a really fun launch campaign. Using custom designed wearable trackers, the babies’ movements were tracked to see how quickly they could complete a full marathon.

My role was to write all the digital copy, which was a great challenge and picked up some nice craft awards for copy at all the major shows.

The campaign got 8.4 million views, earned R2.4 million in PR value and nappy sales went up by 28.9%.

Loerie Awards Silver - Digital & Interactive - Mobile Media

Loerie Awards Bronze - Design for Digital

Qhubeka, a charity that distributes bikes to kids who walk long distances to school, asked us to solve one of their biggest challenges - getting the public involved in a way that's more engaging than just donating some cash.

We came up with a donation platform that lets cyclists build bikes just by riding their bikes.

Assegai Gold for Social Media (Social Media Platforms)

For the 2018 FIFA World Cup, we had a simple idea – to show that there’s no better way to experience the World Cup than on DStv, we convinced four Russian football fans to come watch the whole tournament in South Africa.

If you go by the campaign results, it ended up being DStv’s best world cup ever, with a social media reach of 15 million, R7.8 million in earned media and a 6% increase in new subscribers.

Assegai Awards Gold – Most Effective Use of Content

Assegai Awards Gold – Social Media

Loerie Awards finalist - Social Media

Wunderman Sigi award winner

To mark the 100th birthday of the Coca-Cola contour bottle, we launched a social campaign that celebrates everyone who makes happiness happen by rewarding them with bespoke, personalised Coca-Cola content. Hayley Doron came up with the idea, and art director Jade Amic and I created literally hundreds of unique content pieces over many late nights. 

The campaign broke every previous social campaign's engagement records. Fifteen of SA's top twenty Twitter celebs retweeted our personalised happiness messages, we grew the Coke Facebook account by 100 000 fans, and we spread happiness to millions of South Africans. 

2014 Cannes PR Lions finalist

When the #Neknomination craze hit South Africa and people started nominating brands to commit to random acts of kindness, we wanted to do more than just a once-off donation. We came across a video made by kids at a township school asking cellular operators to make access to Wikipedia free, and after much arm-twisting MTN agreed to play ball.  This stunt earned us loads of PR, as well a nod from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who showed part of our video at the 2015 TED conference.

Promax Silver for Best Promotion for an Online or VOD Service

Bookmarks Silver Pixel for Influencer Marketing

This brief landed in early 2018, when most of our market was still used to watching TV the ‘old’ way – at home, on TV, at a specific time. DStv had an app and a bunch of services that let customers watch TV when and where they want, but no one was using them. Somehow, we went from there to getting seasick in shark infested waters and putting spiders on people’s faces.

It was weird, but it worked: we saw massive uptake of DStv’s apps and services, along with positive subscriber growth.

2015 Loerie Awards illustration craft certificate

2015 Loerie Awards finalist for social media, media innovation, illustration craft and animation craft

As part of Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign, we created an online platform that lets teens create and share custom micro-videos. Hayley and I conceptualised and produced forty 10-second videos on a tight budget, which meant calling in every favour we could, drawing faces on fingers, dodging Wits campus cops and making the account director's 90-year-old gran dance to house music.

The result is a near-infinite combination of personalised videos magically stitched together on the fly and served seamlessly across feature phones, smart devices and computers.

2015 Loerie Awards finalists

I pitched two Youtube pre-roll scripts as part of our digital launch campaign for DStv’s Now video-on-demand app, which client loved so much that they asked us to turn them into TV spots.

These were Aqua's first-ever TV ads, and I was quite chuffed that the 2015 Loeries TV panel, headed by Chuck Porter, thought they deserved a spot on the shortlist. 

ShowMax is the only place where you can watch The Late Late Show with James Corden (of carpool karaoke fame). 

At the time, South Africans didn't know who the guy was, so we got him to introduce himself... in Zulu and Afrikaans. 

2013 Loerie Awards finalist

2013 Wunderman Sigi Awards winner

2013 Bookmark Awards winner

When Coke launched their Crazy for Good TVC, they briefed a bunch of their agencies to hang up swings in random places. We wanted to do something with a lot more impact and reach, so we placed motion counters in each swing we hung up (hacked together using Nokia feature phones), and pledged to grass a soccer field in Alex if enough people swung. We kept our word and got the whole agency out to Alex one Sunday to plant the grass. The guys at Coke loved it and it picked up a few awards. Oh and two years later, the field is still looking great.

Produced at Aqua

Nokia Nigeria briefed Hayley Doron and me to launch the Asha 503, a low-cost smartphone aimed at trend-conscious youths. We pitched a fashion competition where we’d help two young designers launch their own fashion labels. When other Nokia markets got wind of the idea, they wanted to be on board too, so it turned into a continent wide campaign involving some fun fashion shoots and lots of shopping for accessories.

2013 Loerie Awards finalist

2013 Wunderman Sigi Awards winner

2013 Assegai Awards Leader Award

This was the first job that Hayley Doron and I worked on together. It was a tough one – people love to hate Internet Explorer, even when Microsoft fixed a lot of its shortcomings in IE 10.

We came up with a bunch of ideas around all its sexy new features, but we realised that no one would take our word for it – we had to get people to actually use it. So we latched onto the one thing no one can dispute – it’s free. And to get them to try IE 10 for free, we gave away free pizzas to everyone who used it to order online.

To drive our point home (and because we spent our budget on pizzas), Hayley and I made every element of our campaign by hand out of free pizza boxes and dough kindly donated by Debonairs.