Employer branding is well-known in marketing, and it can be as critical as a consumer campaign.

Its role is no less than defining your image and reputation as a place of work amongst jobseekers and current employees. Easy peasy, right? Not really. The competition between brands is high since every company has the same main goals: to present itself as an attractive employer, to improve brand awareness and to attract new talents.

We recently created an employer branding campaign with OTP Bank, the largest commercial bank in Hungary, and we’re happy to share with you the most important lessons and the biggest challenges.

Let’s start from the beginning

People might have a sense of how big OTP is, but trying to find a common message that is as involving for a financial analyst as it is for a security assistant, you realize that it is indeed a HUGE corporation. Our biggest challenge thus was to find a message that calls out to all employee segments with a great variety of needs and expectations.

Great team, highly involving tasks, opportunity to grow – looking at the benefits other market players focus on in their communication, it is safe to say that most of the employee value propositions rhyme with a common pattern. Therefore, with benefits similar to other banks, it was also part of the challenge to find an angle that is unique to the OTP employer branding platform.

Our starting point was to address the gap between the perceived image of OTP as an old-school, big corporate employer versus the innovative tasks it does provide and how the current employees see their lives as part of the OTP group. This is how we ended up with “Together we impact” as the single minded proposition, embodying the challenging professional environment, the great scale of things that OTP employees can affect through their jobs and the inspiring team spirit that is just as important part of the OTP work culture.

Getting the message

But how can we attract and retain talents in the best possible way? How can we say something different than the competitors? As people in general, jobseekers also have lots of trust issues nowadays. That’s why besides emphasizing the key message, it was also important to do this in an authentic way. Since employees are the ones that can provide credible information on what it’s like to work there, we made them the ultimate spokespeople for OTP Bank, and we used the faces and words of real OTP Bank employees in our campaign.

We had to focus on five different branches of business: IT, Contact Center, bank customer service, financial and support teams. The biggest challenge was to find a general headline that everyone in the branch can associate with and after that, we had to personalize them based on the employee’s scope of duties. They gave us insight into their role at the company and we created the messages based on their contribution to the success of colleagues, the life of customers and the development of society. It was also important to constantly ask for feedback from them. The process was long, but we ended up with 29 different headlines for each employee that they could fully identify with. But this was not the end of our task: we had to find a visual framework that matches the brand guidelines and can illustrate the impacts. The many, many different impacts.

Give it your best shot

From a production standpoint, the project also posed numerous challenges. The complexity of the pre-production phase was due to the large number of people and the logistical planning. The extensive preparation was followed by a one-day video shoot and a super-intensive two-day photo shoot. During these three days, we worked together with 29 OTP employees at six different locations. In order to deliver high-quality content within such a tight timeframe and with such a big team, it was crucial for the entire crew to be flexible and proactive.

It's a wrap

As a result, we are all extremely proud of the film and the 35 pictures – individual and group – that were taken, especially because the campaign was able to maintain its authenticity by featuring real OTP employees with whom it was really a pleasure to work. Or in other words, they made a positive impact on us too.