Jon Stona.
How do you create brand awareness in a saturated market? Target sports fans across the globe... and hire American filmmaker Spike Lee.
Airwallex are launching its Arsenal collaboration to Australia, aiming to separate itself from the stigma around B2B brands and target sports fans where they are.
Airwallex vice president, global marketing Jon Stona told AdNews that the aim was to build trust and understanding of the brand with audiences.
“If you think about how we approach trust, we don't typically do the usual classic B2B marketing approach, where it tends to be more white paper heavy,” Stona told AdNews.
“It's about establishing a certain degree of humanity. How do you try and meet people where they are, as opposed to having them come to you?
“Because if I'm trying to introduce you to Airwallex, it's my job to do the heavy lifting to go where you are right now, and we found the way to do that at human level is very much sports culture.
“What we really liked about Arsenal was our shared values, that's what we always looked for.”
The brand launched in Melbourne in 2015 and expanded to the US in 2021.
Scaling the brand has meant focusing on a ‘challenger’ mindset, which emulates Arsenal as a team, according to Stona.
“Fans prioritise watching the game and what happens on the pitch or on the field,” he said.
“Advertising sponsorship is a second priority, and so for us to get the cup thrown, to be an authentic partner, we needed to do something that was essentially made for supporters by supporters.
“Arsenal has not won the Premier League for 22 years, but this constant challenger mindset, the commitment to trying to be a bit contrarian, challenge status quo, was very appealing to us.
“And the sentiment on community we're also trying to do in our startup space, because I mean ourselves as a scaled company from Australia, we share that globality, but also a strong appreciation to where we've come from.”
The campaign features former Arsenal player French football coach, Thierry Henry and English commentator Martin Keown and footballer Rachel Yankey.
Working with director Spike Lee, according to an Airwallex representative, was incredibly professional with the respect of the actors present in his work.
"He was there 6am to 7pm every day and his energy never dropped,” they said.
"His signature technique is the double-dolly shot: subject and camera on separate dollies, creating that floating, almost dreamlike movement. You see it in every Spike film. He was keen to integrate it into our film, so he shaped the script to use the shot for Thierry Henry's entrance.
“Which worked really well as it plays into Henry's icon-of-Arsenal status. It's already been picked up on socials by people who recognise it.
“The friendship between Spike and Thierry was also great to see play out. A lot of warmth and mutual respect between them, and you can feel it carry through to the final work.”
Airwallex collaborated with creative agency Special and Accenture Song on its ‘Future of Finance’ campaign in August last year.
The campaign was designed to cut through category noise and demonstrate to business leaders that they no longer need to settle for outdated systems.
Stona said there was a double digit increase in awareness and familiarity.
“Every six months we do our brand surveys, and so we have a firm sense of market and segment,” he said.
“What gave us a lot of confidence to keep investing in sports was the concrete data that said the partnerships that we had were helping materially improve trust in the brand.
“The second aspect that we track is the terms of real sales conversations, so sales pipeline, source pipeline, new conversations coming in and influence pipeline.
“How are we helping advance some of those partnerships and the human-to-human connection. And then, lastly, just the impact on employee sentiment.”
“We’re finding that even though folks may have known that Airwallex exists, the brand is in a very crowded, hyper competitive space, so articulating what we do is very important.”
Airwallex aims to continue to invest in creators and influencers as part of the evolving media landscape.
Stona also wants to invest in existing partnerships that help challenge the B2B brand space.
“Historically, B2B has had this perception of being a bit too boring, a bit too constrained,” he said.
“As a challenger brand, we can't have that mindset. You have to be bold, challenge the status quo, otherwise you can't advance.”
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