Halifax and LadBible hijack ‘adulting’ trend to help young home-buyers
The Media Plan
It is an understatement to suggest the UK housing market is challenging for first-time buyers. According to a January YouGov poll, 64% of Brits said it was “very hard” for young people to buy a home today. An additional 23% agreed it was “fairly hard”.
For prospective first-time buyers who do manage to save enough cash for a deposit, the rest of the buying process is not necessarily simple either.
“61% of recent home buyers felt that the mortgage-application process was actually more frustrating than saving for a deposit,” Reema Toor, managing partner at Publicis media agency Zenith UK, told The Media Leader. “It was confusing, lengthy, overcomplicated and people felt out of control.”
Zenith was tasked with developing a campaign for Halifax that could help “demystify” the process.
“Halifax’s positioning is: ‘It’s a people thing.’ They’re relatable, down to earth and tell it like it is,” said Toor. “Crucially, their business is built on supporting first-time buyers to get on the ladder, meaning they were uniquely placed to cut through the unhelpful noise and make the mortgage process easier.”
To that end, Zenith teamed up Halifax with entertainment publisher LadBible with the goal of creating “fun and informative content that tackled common questions and challenges” in the home-buying process. As part of the partnership, Halifax sponsored a LadBible-produced “adulting gameshow”, posted across LadBible’s social accounts.
Toor suggested that LadBible was a natural fit for the campaign, as the publisher could authentically reach first-time buyers at scale. LadBible’s approachable and relatable brand mirrored Halifax’s own ethos.
“A collaboration between these two brands was the secret ingredient to breaking down the mortgage process for first-time buyers,” she added.
Communicating a ‘heavy topic’ with humour
Zenith examined a blend of Halifax’s data from customer surveys and interactions alongside research from LadNation to gauge information about the home-buying process among 25- to 44-year-olds.
The research fed into the questions asked during the “adulting gameshow” — itself designed to take advantage of the broader “adulting” trend on social media platforms.
“To avoid long, complicated and overwhelming content, everything was structured around simple true-or-false home-buying questions being put to first-time buyers and answered by a Halifax mortgage advisor, demonstrating how easy the mortgage process could be with a bit of help from Halifax,” Toor explained.
Zenith considered a number of metrics when examining the campaign’s performance. According to Toor, Halifax’s site traffic doubled week to week, with the partnership helping to drive over 28,500 clicks and 16,800 unique visits.
Furthermore, within the first two weeks of the campaign, 70 individuals began mortgage application journeys with Halifax as a direct result of the activity with LadBible.
“The partnership allowed us to create fun and engaging content from what is usually a heavy topic to try and communicate to the first-time buyer audience,” reflected Toor.
“We were able to be bold and create content that the audience was engaged and interacting with. This helped demonstrate to our risk and product teams that these are the right platforms and channels to reach this audience, which in turn helped bring them along on the journey.”