Challenge:

• In a media environment already extremely hostile towards banks, the Government had launched a high-profile campaign, led by Lord Mandleson, to introduce new regulation to the credit card sector.
• This resulted in several months of extensive scrutiny of the industry, in both the news and personal finance pages of the national press. It was against this difficult and challenging backdrop Egg re-launched Egg Money, the first mass market credit card to charge a fee in almost a decade.

Solution:

• The team recommended a counter intuitive media strategy, advising that Egg escalate this product launch (and issues management exercise) into a high profile proactive corporate story, led not by the product head, but by the CEO, Bert Pijls.
• Our advice was to leverage the fact that Egg Money was the first card to reintroduce fees into the credit card mass market as a hook to engage influential journalists, to rebuild media relationships and to talk about Egg, the business, the brand, the people and the future.

Implementation:

Preparation:

• A media rehearsal and messaging session was undertaken with the CEO to prepare him for media scrutiny and agree the most persuasive corporate and product messages.
• Our public policy team also conducted an issues audit and provided ongoing monitoring to ensure we were alerted to any risks (e.g. the Consumer White paper), and make sure the CEO was kept informed of the key industry issues ahead of the launch. ? Research was commissioned to evidence and independently verify our agreed product and consumer messages.

Execution:

• A tightly-phased media plan was executed to control the campaign. The story was embargoed for the weekend, and the team arranged face to face pre-launch media briefings for the CEO and journalists from selected national newspapers.
• Crucially, in parallel, the team arranged pre-launch briefings between the product head and highly influential aggregators.
• Finally, the team briefed the editorial teams from key websites and portals on the Friday before launch, to avoid them breaking the Saturday embargo.

Outcome:

• PR was the only activity agreed to promote the launch of the card. Between 14th July, when the page went live, and 23rd July, the Egg Money section of egg.com received 9,151visitors following the PR generated coverage on the weekend of 11th /12th July.
• 46 items of coverage were generated - 8 national features, 5 regionals and 33 onlines.
• The team secured balanced coverage communicating the benefits fee based credit card.
• 43% of the coverage was positive in tone and 48% was balanced in tone.
• Message penetration: the majority of the coverage contained at least one key message.