Active is: Visualising a future of innovative investments

This post is sponsored by Allianz Global Investors.

To the average consumer, investment is not something that is easy to understand. From the range of different product offerings to brand communications messages, it all seems the same to the average consumer.

As a market leader in the asset management industry, Allianz Global Investors is constantly finding ways to break out from this sea of sameness and make our brand memorable and differentiated in the minds of consumers.

Differentiate through highlighting what our brand stands for – “Active is”

Beyond just being a provider of funds and products, we needed to tell a bigger story about our brand’s mission.

At AllianzGI, “Active” is the most important word in our vocabulary. It doesn’t just describe how we manage portfolios at Allianz Global Investors. It defines our entire approach as a business, from the enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit of our employees, to our self-critical assessment of performance. Active is how we create and share value with clients.

Build thought leadership through innovative investing

Based on the brand narrative of “Active is”, in the Singapore market, AllianzGI identified innovation and innovative investing as the firm’s focus this year, emphasising on different innovative investment strategies and solutions that we would be offering to investors. And we wanted to communicate what our brand stands for with highly relevant content in highly relevant channels.

Utilising print to strategically target and engage with investors

To understand what channels were optimal to reach our target audience in Singapore, we conducted a brand study. From the findings, we concluded that newspapers were the best channel to create the greatest impact for our brand.

By leveraging newspaper platforms, we can target our audiences when their mindset is actively looking for financial information and educate them on our innovative investment themes.

Finding the right publication is the key. It needs to be the most trusted and dependable source for financial information, its readers’ profiles need to be in line with our target group and investors, as well as having a wide circulation so we can maximise our advertisement’s reach.

A branding print ad to deliver our manifesto

Our campaign launched with a full-page branding print ad that delivered a manifesto on AllianzGI’s belief in the active asset management approach and the importance of identifying future opportunities for innovative investment and leveraging the latest technologies.

Native print ads – educating through infographics

The later versions of the branding piece also expanded to include infographics which delved deeper into the different core themes. These infographics were placed natively within the newspaper so they seemed like part of the newspaper content, thereby fulfilling the role of being a print content series.

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Bite-sized print ads to deliver bite-sized information

Throughout the campaign period, we also developed a series of print ads that delivered our themes in a succinct manner. They delivered our core themes and intrigued audiences to learn more about them.

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Owning a consistent space

This series owned a consistent area on the newspaper front page to further build brand awareness and recall. By owning a fixed space, we were able to reinforce these ads were part of a broader content series, and readers could also gradually come to expect the next theme and piece of content from AllianzGI.

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Using print to drive an offline-to-online experience

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To stay top-of-mind for our audiences, we not only maintained a prominent and consistent space in the newspaper, we also reached audiences in the online space through the digital platform, where we adapted our print content into digital moving GIFs to create greater interest and prolonged brand exposure.

All print and digital banners directed consumers to our campaign website, ap.allianzgi.com, where they could delve into greater detail into these innovative themes and how our products leverage these themes to deliver value to them.

Our print campaign was a great success in terms of reaching our target audience and educating them on the relationship between innovation and investment across our core themes, and AllianzGI’s capabilities in this area, thereby, also successfully building our thought leadership in this area, and further strengthening our market leader positioning in the category.

In the end, not only were we able to stand out the AllianzGI brand through creating a conversation about innovative investment, but we were also able to drive thought leadership and strengthen our position as the market leader in the investment category.