Native advertising on a small budget: Engaging financial literacy campaign connects with families

We're highlighting the winners of the Native Advertising Awards 2022. This post features The Best Use of Native Advertising on a Small Budget.

• Campaign: Kids & Money
• Publisher/Agency: Seznam Brand Studio, Czech Republic
• Brand: Czech National Bank

The Czech National Bank wanted to help families manage their income responsibly, avoid unfavourable loans and educate their children in financial literacy. It therefore wanted to create content that would position itself as an active and relevant partner to teachers and parents in relation to children's financial education.

The content needed to explain why financial literacy for children is essential, be functional for parents and teachers yet interesting to children, easy to teach whether at home or at school and reach those users who don't visit standard news sites. 

Despite having a limited budget, Seznam Brand Studio was able to create an interactive article visually built on playful illustrations and colours. It also joined forces with a popular video series in which children share their thoughts on money, such as their knowledge on average wages, mortgages, taxes and rental expenses. The episode was placed in the article and also ran on Internet TV.

Read more about doing native advertising on a small budget in 
our interview with the head of Seznam Brand Studio, Andy Sitta

The article covered the three distinct themes of savings, loans and inflation. The studio interweaved the text with several interactive elements to guide users to their own approach to finance. With a calculator and interactive puzzles, for example, the content aimed to show children how much they could save even with small amounts of pocket money.

Distribution

The campaign was published on the Seznam Zprávy news website, the most trusted news website in the Czech Republic behind public media.

It was also promoted through content trailers which directly linked to the interactive article. These were placed on lifestyle, fashion, cosmetics, automotive and tabloid news websites in an attempt to target those who were overwhelmed by negative press concerning the pandemic and therefore not looking at news.

Social networks were also used to target teachers.

Results

The campaign achieved the following results: 

• Downloads: Teaching materials were downloaded more than 6,280 times throughout the campaign (the goal was 700 downloads) –  the materials were downloaded by teachers and parents alike. 
• Time spent: Average time spent on the interactive article was 6 minutes, 8 seconds (the goal was to get over the 3-minute limit). 
• Unique readers: A record 96,379 unique users viewed the content (the campaign guaranteed a minimum 20,000 unique readers) and there were more than 35,000 viewers of the "Children versus money" video. 

In terms of ROI, the distribution of the teaching material cost less than 32 Czech crowns for each download – a great investment in the development of children's financial literacy.

Takeaway

Users interact with a site if they understand the benefits and what they’ll achieve by interacting. 

Even with low budgets, it’s possible to build a campaign that impacts the real lives of people. It’s not always necessary to devise an innovative solution, sometimes it’s perfectly adequate just to follow a clear, straightforward path to a goal. 

Quality, meaningful and successful native content is created better with a brand that has natural authority and reputation in the public space.