How YouTube helped make a national brand feel like a neighborhood fixture

Marloes Flink is responsible for building customer insight and media strategy at Rabobank. Her background in insights for both agency and brands, helps keep consumers at the heart of the Dutch bank’s brand building and product campaigns.

Rabobank began as a farmers’ cooperative bank back in 1972. Since then we have become one of the top three banks in the Netherlands.

However, in banking, younger customers have traditionally adopted the same bank as their parents.

We recognised that if we didn’t attract these younger customers early — before they needed financial products like loans or mortgages — we risked aging out of some of our regions entirely. We needed to connect with Gen Z, transforming our image from a traditional rural institution to a modern, urban option.

We realised that to capture the attention of this demographic, we had to rethink our advertising approach.

Starting with an insight

I’m very insight driven, and know from various research studies that Gen Z wants connection and authenticity, especially in advertising.

In a digital-first world where attention is increasingly fragmented, young adults are most receptive to brands that show up authentically in the places that matter to them. Real-world visibility in their own city creates familiarity, relevance, and mental availability more effectively than just another ad in their social feed.

That was our starting point.

To show that we understood their local challenges, nuances, and needs, we devised “City Takeover” campaigns across six major Dutch cities. The strategy was to make the brand unmissable by featuring real, local entrepreneurs on tailored offline billboards.

We worked with local Rabobank branches to find the right faces and the most authentic neighborhoods — opting for the southeast part of Amsterdam, rather than generic tourist spots for instance. Here we also worked with Lovia Opoku, a local entrepreneur in community building and a Rabobank customer.

In Groningen, our OOH campaign used iconic city locations — including the Martini Tower in Groningen — and local cuisine like the ‘Groningse eierbal'.

We wanted young people to walk down their street and see someone who looked, worked, and lived just like them to reinforce the bank’s local roots.

Outdoor ads were at the heart of the campaign because it would reach our intended audience where they were.

But, as Mark Ritson said: If you combine a bit of traditional with a bit of digital, you invariably get a better result than choosing just one. After all, multiple touchpoints create a stronger impact.

That’s why we added a supportive digital layer as an additional touchpoint — using YouTube, Display, and social.

As young people spend quite a bit of time online, we ‘copied’ the outdoor ads to their online world.

Embracing the art of ‘bothism’

However, our team faced a twofold challenge. Our photography rights for the campaign were strictly local, and we only had static assets to work with.

Traditional video seemed out of reach.

This is where our media agency, Mindshare, stepped in with a brilliant pivot. They helped us transform our static outdoor images into dynamic 6-second YouTube bumper ads. They took the exact outdoor assets people were seeing on their daily commutes and adapted them into short, punchy digital formats.

Then, using precise geo-targeting on YouTube, we ensured that a young person in Amsterdam only saw the Amsterdam entrepreneur they might have just walked past on the street.

Results to bank on

By treating online video as a localised extension of our physical assets, the campaign achieved incredible results.

The thing that surprised us most, was the rise in positive brand attitude, consideration, and brand preference.

For example, one of the biggest successes for me was from qualitative research interviews with Gen Zs in urban areas about finances and banking. During these, participants spontaneously brought up this campaign, citing how much they loved seeing familiar faces and local environments.

Six-second forced-view bumpers are typically difficult to measure via traditional view-through metrics. However, our completion rates and media metrics scored above internal KPIs and platform benchmarks.

The future of marketing doesn’t lie in reaching the most people; it lies in reaching the right people, in the right place, with a message that feels entirely their own.

And sometimes, the tightest creative constraints are exactly what ignite us to build the most innovative, resonant campaigns.