Background

Following a soft launch of the product in 2017, we were tasked with bringing PayPal’s ‘Money Pools’ to life for a UK audience, in an authentic and contextualised way. This was the biggest consumer product launch of the year and one of PayPal’s largest priorities on their marketing calendar.

PayPal Money Pools is the answer to the woes of group purchases. It solves key pain points related to collecting money from multiple people, and does this better than PayPal’s competition. Research has shown that 31% of their current consumer base have used PayPal to “pay back their friends for a group purchase”, so they anticipated some traction.

PayPal Money Pools provides their millions of current customers a more personalised and organised way to manage shared expenses. It also eases the burden of having to front the money or chase down people to pay you back.

We had two key audience groups. From the soft launch earlier in the year, these groups had indicated that they would be most responsive to the product. These audiences were ‘Adults with children’ (children being those who were still at school) and ‘Young Singletons’ (18-35, without kids).

Strategy

We researched the most pressing issues amongst Brits in 2018 and were astonished to find that, despite knowing the importance of switching off and having fun together with our loved ones, a quarter of all Britons (16 million) have missed a social occasion due to work. To make things worse, 30 percent of UK parents report to leaving home every day without having seen their children.

The work-life balance in the UK is in massive decline. We don’t realise how often we sacrifice time with friends and family. Therefore, the times we do get together are really important.

When you finally get a chance to get together, you want it to be done right. Not half-arsed. Not ‘just ok’.

You want to ‘make it count’. This became our creative proposition.

We took those moments when people get together and made them truly great by encouraging them to plan ahead and collect money for big group occasions, instead of mopping up afterwards.

PayPal Money Pools became the simple answer to the tiresome task of funding group fun. It allows you to set up a digital ‘kitty’ and share it with your friends. Everyone can contribute ahead of time so it’s not left to the one who gets the short straw to chase for money afterwards.

But we didn’t stop there.

Research revealed five key occasions where group funding can cause unnecessary headaches; holidays, festivals, birthdays, teacher gifts and summer parties.

With a concept based on each of these situations, we could inspire product usage amongst different social groups. Rather than rely on product features, we played up the fun factor of each situation. We targeted our chosen audience groups across a variety of media – OOH, digital display, search, social and more.

So why gift a succulent when you can get them a giant cactus? Why two-man tent when you can teepee? No matter what our audience are up to, we made sure that PayPal were there to help our audiences go bigger and better with less fuss.

But most importantly, we got people thinking about how to make the most out of time spent with their loved ones.

Confidential Results (FOR JUDGES EYES ONLY)

By amplifying group fun, we grabbed people’s attention and then we made them act.

In the first 25 days of the campaign, we enhanced 4.1k social occasions through the creation of money pools.

1.8k pools were then activated and used by customers, with a further 935 adding to their pool totals since the launch of the campaign.

With another 4 weeks to go, we’re confident that PayPal Money Pools will be on hand to help even more people make a splash without splashing out this summer.

PayPal - Money Pools

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