Klarna | Why Pay Interest | CMA Gold Award - Best Consumer

The Challenge.

Being in the financial services sector naturally brings detractors and confusion about products, services and fees. It’s also not traditionally the most interesting sector. We wanted to change that.

Working closely with the Klarna team, we were briefed to devise and launch a bold, multi-channel campaign that would:

• Stand Klarna apart from traditional banking

• Increase awareness overall, awareness with key audiences and awareness ahead of competitors

• Counteract myths, dispel confusion and silence critics. Klarna’s pay later products are interest and fee free and allow you to snooze payments, providing a safer way to shop

• Showcase the benefits of Klarna products vs other financial services products, such as credit cards

The Solution.

We told the UK that we didn’t want their interest. Quickly turning-around creative across multiple paid and owned properties, we devised taglines like ‘no thanks, old banks’, ‘why pay the old way?’ and ‘this ad doesn’t want your interest’. This coupled with Klarna’s stand-out branding, helped deliver the message in a punchy, instantly accessible way across social, digital, print and outdoor.

The Results.

Telling people to pay us no interest really got them paying interest. The right kind. We over-delivered on all the KPIs, with just weeks from brief to launch.

Specifically, we delivered:

• An overall increase in awareness of 5% (measured via nationally representative surveys with Attest)

• Increased from 7th to 4th place overall for unprompted awareness for payment methods – placing ahead of all competitors

• 2.95m impacts from our Piccadilly Lights digi OOH

• 87% positive sentiment

• 140k impressions and 9k likes on just 3 organic meme posts on Instagram, helping get the message out beyond our existing consumer network

• Over-performance vs target of between 20% and 40% for paid social metrics, including 536.6k engagements, 25.4m impressions, 6.8m reach and 41.9k clicks

Mark Godfrey, Head of B2C Marketing Klarna UK, said:

"We at Klarna are used to flying by the seat of our pants but this one took the proverbial… Puzzle were able to skillfully navigate their way through this ever changing and expanding media plan with a composure and agility which gave us the freedom to be as creative and relevant to the locations and placements of our media as possible. 

The quality of the output, particularly on premium, hero placements such as County Hall and Piccadilly Lights was nothing short of remarkable in the timeframe and exceeded our expectations.

As the campaign grew in scale and stature it transformed into something far more powerful than a quick, targeted, burst campaign and as you can see from the results, it  achieved a significant shift in awareness of Klarna and our offering."