CATEGORY:Financial
REGION:USA
DATE:Mar 2008 - Nov 2008
The American Express Card was struggling to maintain its uniqueness in a flooded credit card category. Its competitors were also beginning to target a more affluent customer – Amex’s traditional target. American Express needed to differentiate itself and establish new relevance with today’s consumers in sensitive economic times.
Amex decided that what made it unique was the community of card members, which it decided to activate to make ‘the value of belonging’ central to American Express’s core value proposition.
Digitas identified a strong “sense of purpose and moral integrity” among American Express Card-members. Members Project had launched in 2007 to allow Amex cardholders to channel donations to specific charitably causes. MP ’08 saw those who participated the previous year contacted at a grassroots level and then activated via social media.
They were invited to submit their project ideas and use a wide range of promotional tools, including Facebook pages, project widgets, HTML emails, IM techniques and video to rally support for their favourite projects.
They were invited to submit their project ideas and use a wide range of promotional tools, including Facebook pages, project widgets, HTML emails, IM techniques and video to rally support for their favourite projects. Having submitted their cause ideas they were hosted on a powerful Web 2.0 platform and voting was encouraged by the project owners themselves, promoting their entries and buoyed by paid media tied to milestone voting dates. The winning causes received up to $2.5m from American Express. 
The social and self-promotional elements of the communications strategy increased organic visitation and engagement with MembersProject.com over 500% from previous year. Participants in MP ’08 were also more than 5 times as likely to socially promote the program compared to previous American Express marketing efforts that did not contain an appeal to the collective power of Membership.

The social and self-promotional elements of the communications strategy increased organic visitation and engagement with MembersProject.com over 500% from previous year. Participants in MP ’08 were also more than 5 times as likely to socially promote the program compared to previous American Express marketing efforts that did not contain an appeal to the collective power of Membership.














Fifteen different ambient scenarios were executed in four main cities in Norway during a two week period. Some 1000 posters were placed next to ‘missing cat’ posters, along with the question “What is kebab made of?”. A broken grand piano made to look as if it had fallen from the sky and landed in the centre of Oslo on street level with a ‘person’ trapped under it, complete with moving limbs, was accompanied by the question “What is Karma?”. This was supported by a digital campaign involving more than 200 banners on 60 websites including MSN and Facebook as well as more niche websites.
The web campaign lasted for 8 weeks and each banner was tailored to its environment. On Facebook the question “can I get fired by checking my Facebook profile while I work?” was posed.
On a fitness website they asked: “How does liposuction actually work?”. Answers to the question would be found at guru.sol.no. 



AstraZeneca wanted to build an online tool for the breast cancer community to celebrate and support its patients and survivors. One of AstraZeneca’s cancer drugs is Arimidex, which is indicated for early and advanced breast cancer. 




