Introducing a global commerce powerhouse to the US
The ability to shop online introduced a new world of challenges for merchants, which intensified as shopping via mobile devices became viable. Customer bases have grown and opportunities for expansion are everywhere. Local payment methods, a variety of devices, and the need to be omni-channel have drastically changed the payments industry.
Adyen, a Dutch payments company, makes global commerce seamless by removing friction and enabling end-to-end transparency across regions, channels, and devices through a payments platform that lets merchants track more, worry less, and adapt faster. And while widely recognized in Europe, Adyen was relatively unknown in the US. So we started with some research.
We interviewed company employees and customers, and what we learned helped clearly define Adyen’s positioning as the global payments authority. We translated that position into something its customers could really appreciate: the payments platform of choice for the world’s leading companies.
“Strategy work is not all whiteboards and brainstorm sessions. A lot of it is about concision: writing down a positioning line, questioning every single word, and rewriting until only the most essential words remain.” —GDP Head of Strategy Danielle Bird
After a wide-ranging creative exploration, we landed on a theme and a tagline: “Business. Not boundaries.” What does it mean? That Adyen is the ideal partner for companies unwilling to be confined by traditional limitations. We designed the campaign to communicate Adyen’s expertise in helping businesses accept new, emerging payment types and overcome the barriers to growth they constantly face.
The Godfrey Dadich team partnered with renowned photographer Art Streiber, famous for his portraits of entertainment and sports celebrities, to create four hero scenarios in which transactions are taking place across geographical boundaries. To bring these scenarios to life in motion, the team worked with effects house Imaginary Forces, specifically with director Michelle Dougherty. (While working on our project, Dougherty won a Primetime Emmy for the Stranger Things main title sequence.)
Through careful set dressing, wardrobe, and background imagery, we depicted customers in Brazil, France, Germany, China, England, the USA—and even one customer on a plane—using tablets, mobile devices, and in-store terminals to defy the traditional boundaries of commerce and get the products and services they want.
The Singapore Changi Airport, which an estimated 25,000 people pass through each day.
A stretch of San Francisco’s Highway 80, which hosts 4 million cars during a typical month. (The old Pacific Telephone building, where GDP’s office was once located, is to the left of the billboard.)
The result was a visually striking campaign that spanned a dozen countries and four languages. Through strategic media placements across billboards, airport out-of-home, and even TV spots, it brought the story of Adyen to a whole new audience and increased name recognition in the payments space around the world.
Carefully targeted placements ensured a broad reach for the campaign, which helped drive a 402 percent growth in new visitors to Adyen’s homepage. Broadcasting the ad to the San Francisco Bay Area during Golden State Warriors games reached an estimated 86 million viewers.
After the successful launch, Adyen tasked us with elevating “Business. Not Boundaries” to the next level, targeting new industries like travel/hospitality and quick service restaurants, all while complementing the graphic simplicity of their brand. We partnered with Imaginary Forces again and brought in the photography team JUCO to create a series of new seamless payment scenarios.