UOB: New Access for Swiftie Success
UOB is Southeast Asia’s leading issuer of credit cards and one of the region’s largest banks by assets. Following the acquisition of Citi’s retail banking business, UOB was seeking to build on Citi’s heritage by positioning its brand as premium and global, while standing out from other regional banks by taking a more contemporary approach to cardholder benefits.
Opportunity
Culture Group was tasked with ideating a cultural opportunity that would engage a disparate cardholder base across five markets while still being relevant to the bank’s main customer base and home market, Singapore.
Solution
Partnership
With unparalleled understanding and access within the cultural industries, we secured the opportunity for UOB to participate as the official bank partner of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which is taking place only in Singapore. By working with the IP owner and event promoter, we developed this opportunity before it was ever discussed with the wider market.
Program
With the partnership in place, we brought it to life with a slew of programs designed for UOB to own the moment across Southeast Asia for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
We focused on 3 key areas: Ticketing, Stakeholder Management, and Creators.
We focused the bank’s rights on Ticketing with pre-sale offers that would have a large-scale impact, without the high cost or branding-related assets (i.e. title sponsorship) — resulting in a 40% reduction in sponsorship fee.
We crafted Stakeholder Management playbooks, linking UOB with Ticketmaster. Additionally, we managed end-to-end hospitality for 120 attendees across 6 shows, including site selection, customer journey design, merchandise procurement, catering, and critical response planning.
We then partnered UOB with 20 Creators across 5 markets around the region, working collaboratively to make sure that the bank’s brand values matched the creator’s personality. From there, we proposed and managed creator concepts, both pre- and post- shows, through various revisions with the assurance that key messages and objectives were met.
Production
Specifically for Access and Presale, we produced a range of work designed to provide a clear path in the lead-up to the shows. This began with an onboarding process of key stakeholders before delivering pin codes across 5 markets.
We then developed and refined the customer journey from end-to-end — this covers writing and fine-tuning FAQs, to creating, revising and delivering hundreds of digital assets across key phases: Announcement, Presale (including Soldout), and General sales.
Impact
UOB owned the cultural conversation in the lead-up to the event, making ownership of a UOB credit card more culturally relevant and desirable than any form of wealth or prestige.
Advising the brand on an owned and earned media strategy led to UOB being identified as the most prominent brand among the event’s announcements, despite their investment being the lowest.
Beyond brand impact through culture, UOB saw huge business results too: 130% increase in debit applications and the daily average credit card applications rose by 45% across five SEA markets. The upward trend continued and translated into usage, where spending by UOB credit and debit card holders spiked by 35% across the concert weeks.
From Campaign Asia:
The partnership has worked spectacularly well for UOB, helping them to acquire new customers, a significant proportion of whom are females from the 25-29-year-old demographic, as well as other benefits.
“We are very pleased with the overwhelming response from this partnership, having seen a significant increase in new customer acquisitions, engagements and spend, which continued beyond the ticket sales period,” says Jacquelyn Tan, head, group personal financial services, UOB.
“We achieved a faster growth rate in customer spend for travel and entertainment than industry benchmarks for credit and debit card spend for the region last year. We also had a significant lift in brand metrics, bolstering our credentials as a regional bank and we are pleased that the improvements continue to follow through to 2024.
