Client Profile: Nationwide

Nationwide building society was born from the idea that we are greater than the sum of our parts. Now, through the medium of spoken word poetry, the brand has been given a voice that brings to life its commitment to empower ordinary people. Kate Hollowood talks to Nationwide CMO Sara Bennison and VCCP’s deputy ECD Jim Thornton about going with your gut and the transformational power of creativity

Central London slum housing, 1884. Thick smoke chokes and children are dying of cholera. A group of people decide to take action and band together to build a better future. “They couldn’t afford a house because banks didn’t lend to people like them,” says Nationwide CMO Sara Bennison of the building society’s founding members. However, by pooling their savings together, one by one they each managed to buy a home.

When she joined the brand last year, Bennison realised that this story needed to be told. Not only does it express the brand’s values, it illustrates Nationwide’s key point of difference: that it is a building society, not a bank. The challenge was how to tell it. “It’s a humble organisation almost by design,” says Bennison. “That means people who know us tend to love us, but our awareness levels are low overall. We needed to tell the brand story in a way that’s impactful, but that also fits with an organisation that’s inherently quiet. It’s a bit of a dichotomy.”

Using the story of the brand’s origins, a strategy was designed that would give voice to what ordinary people are thinking and feeling. “You could imagine the work that this could have led to, something worthy but dull,” explains Bennison. “Where we’ve ended up is absolutely true to the strategy but it’s a completely different way of executing, producing and briefing.” 

Instead of using vox pops or actors, the brand’s most recent campaign, Voices Nationwide, expresses what ordinary people think and feel through the art of the spoken word. A series of short films feature poets reciting verses they’ve written loosely themed around Nationwide’s values or products, such as buying a first home.

In one film, 16-year-old spoken word artist Isadora describes how she felt when she was given her own set of house keys. “Even now, they’re like a kite string in my back pocket,” she says, “anchoring me to home.” The film culminates with the line, “When you need a bit of independence, our FlexOne account for 11-17 year olds could be a good place to start.”

It was important for the brand to partner with a range of different poets in order to reflect the diversity of the building society’s members. To promote the joint account to young couples, a series of poems by Laurie Bolger describe her experiences of moving in with her boyfriend. “There’s still things that need fixing here, there always is. But there’s no one I’d rather change lightbulbs with,” she says.

Other executions include a series of short poems turned into idents for ITV Documentaries and a film detailing Nationwide’s history through verse written and performed by poet Jo Bell. In a one-off TV spot for Mother’s Day, spoken word artist Laurie Ogden performed a personalised poem as a surprise for a Belfast mum called Mo. Ogden wrote the poem, which refers to in-jokes as well as a family tragedy, with the help of Mo’s son Gavin. The film reveals Mo’s tearful reaction as she hears it with Gavin by her side.

Feelings, nothing more than feelings

On a spring morning at Nationwide’s London HQ, Bennison appears every inch the corporate high-flyer – poker–straight hair, navy shift dress, firm handshake – until your gaze falls to her not-so-sensible footwear. The gloriously grass-green designer heels suggest the building society board member has a less serious side, a suspicion confirmed when she admits she bought them during a tedious meeting.

Bennison joined Nationwide as its first ever CMO, working alongside VCCP deputy executive creative director and former colleague Jim Thornton. Sat at one corner of a vast boardroom table, the pair recount the story of the recent Mother’s Day ad like two friends blearily recalling a hilarious night out. “Why did we think that would be a good idea?”, “God knows.” (The campaign was shot the day before Mother’s Day with the editing, sound design and grading completed overnight.)

While their remarks could be seen as flippant, they are in fact indicative of why the work has been so successful. From the outset, the working process has been organic and based on intuition. For the initial meetings, Bennison would set a broad essay question for discussion, such as what does membership mean today? Or, what could a building society mean? As different answers were explored, the meeting room walls gradually became covered with Post-it notes until one referencing Hollie McNish’s spoken word poetry struck a chord. 

VCCP’s creative team started crafting briefs for various spoken word poets around relevant themes. “We didn’t want to brief them to write about a current account,” says Bennison. “Actually, your first account is all about independence, so we briefed around that. We get an area to explore, but the core thought is never more than a sentence. Then we let it into the outside world and see what comes back.” 

Bennison believes that taking this approach has resulted in more insightful work. “With Isadora’s poem, I could have done 50 research groups and we would never have got to that analogy with the keys. It would have been lost in the creative process,” she says.

It was crucial that the poems weren’t interfered with in order for the work to feel authentic. So several different poets were given the same brief, allowing the team to choose from a selection of poems rather than edit a single script. “We had some hum-dinging rows in the course of this because the response that people have to the work is really personal,” says Bennison, while Thornton chuckles in agreement.

“Ultimately, sometimes you can rationalise why something isn’t right, by saying that’s off strategy in some way,” says Bennison. “But other times you just have to accept that you don’t like it, or it just doesn’t feel right, and ultimately that is as good a reason as any.” Thornton is of the same mind: “It’s so much about perception and emotion rather than rationality. What’s amazing about these ads is they’re all about feeling.”

When failure is absolutely an option

The films are stripped back to focus entirely on the poet’s performance. With the goal of authenticity in mind, they were shot without make-up, music, props or lighting in an environment that the poet was comfortable in. The creative direction was inspired by the Dogme 95 movement, which aims to purify filmmaking by not using special effects and instead emphasising story, acting and theme. Pioneered by Danish directors Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier in the 90s, the movement is based on a set of rules that forbid the use of, for example, optical work, filters, props and sets. Dogme filmmaking is also about removing the ego of the director. For this reason, Thornton directed the films himself.

One benefit of this style of filmmaking is that it is vastly less expensive than producing a traditional TV ad. “The economics is interesting. Because it’s cheap, you have permission to fail,” says Bennison. “And you know what the irony of this is? Because of that, you fail less. Because you haven’t got scared, you’ve gone with your gut. I don’t think any of us thought [the Mother’s Day film] was going to work, we just thought it would be lovely if it did. We thought, let’s have a crack, you never know. Whereas in a normal process, you would have lost faith and researched and tested the hell out of the idea, you wouldn’t dare to just do it.”

The process allowed each film to be produced more quickly, allowing the content to be more timely. “Some of the phrases have particular resonance because they’re of the moment,” explains Bennison. As an example she cites Jo Bell’s poem, which describes the building society as being built on “a currency of kindness”. “The phrase was written in the middle of the run up to Trump. If you weren’t writing that just before you shot it, how would you know that was the way the world was feeling at that point?” 

“That’s where the client-agency relationship comes in,” Thornton chimes in. “Because usually the script would be pulled over and over and be tweaked and changed, and a phrase like ‘the currency of kindness’ would get skewed.”

Smarter than the average client-agency relationship

Thornton and Bennison don’t have your average client-agency relationship. The pair met right at the beginning of their careers, when they were both working at JWT. When Nationwide brought them back together again, Thornton knew things were going to be interesting from the way Bennison directed the company’s internal processes. One of her first moves as CMO was to overhaul and humanise the language that people used about the business and its products within the company. She also integrated departments to improve communication and break down silos. “That encouraged us to change our processes as well,” says Thornton.

The history between the pair meant there was a level of trust from the beginning. “I know she values creative work, and I know I can have an argument with her,” explains Thornton. “It’s so important to know that it’s not personal. There was an immediate rapport, whereas normally you’d spend six to nine months earning that.”

It’s a sign of the times that working relationships like theirs are rare. “If I was to write a case study of how to work with a client this would be it,” he continues. “I haven’t had this for 10-15 years because the industry has become more process and procurement driven and less about relationships.”

He also believes that Bennison’s background, being ex-agency but with a number of years’ experience on the client side (she spent almost eight years as CMO at Barclays), has helped enable the brand’s more creative approach. “She’s a good ally because she knows how to get good work through an organisation that isn’t traditionally used to that.”

It’s that balance that makes Bennison such an interesting client and important voice in the industry. “From a business point of view, creativity comes down to very hard numbers. The uptake we’ve seen since this campaign has been driven by creativity. As an industry, we’re too focused on measuring every last click. The most valuable, transformational thing is a creative thought that incites a feeling that drives consideration and awareness. We seem to have forgotten that intense value for the business comes from cherishing creativity.”