WATCH IT SHRINK
Meridian Bank · Financial Services
Challenge
Behaviour change — Working adults aged 30-50 in emerging and developed markets who maintain significant cash savings outside the formal banking system — often influenced by a family tradition of distrust toward financial institutions, yet increasingly aware that inflation is eroding their purchasing power.
Insight
In many cultures, the physical act of hiding money in the home — under the mattress, inside a book, behind a loose tile — is not driven by ignorance of banking but by an inherited emotional ritual of control. People feel richer when they can touch their money, because the tangibility equals safety in a way that a bank balance on a screen never has.
Idea
Make the invisible feel tangible: Meridian created 'Your Money Is Still Yours,' a digital platform and microsite that let people virtually 'place' their savings in a photorealistic digital replica of their own home, then watch in real time as animated inflation physically shrank the cash pile day by day — turning the invisible threat of doing nothing into a visceral, almost painful visual experience.
Execution
Users uploaded a photo of their home interior through the Meridian microsite. A bespoke Flash-based tool composited a hyper-realistic stack of local-currency banknotes into the image — sized proportionally to the amount the user entered. Each day the user returned, the pile was visibly smaller, eaten away by that country's real inflation rate, pulled live from Reuters data. A daily email subject line read only: 'Your money shrank again last night.' The tone was never preachy; it was quietly devastating. No voiceover told people what to do. The visual did all the persuading. Companion online video spots showed time-lapse sequences of iconic hiding places — cookie tins, shoeboxes, hollowed-out books — with cash slowly dissolving inside them like paper in water.