INSITE OOH Media Platform

Standard Chartered has rolled out a new large-scale OOH campaign across Dubai, placing a series of high-impact billboards in some of the city’s most visible financial and lifestyle corridors. Ranging from Sheikh Zayed Road to Media City, to other major roads, this campaign aims to position the bank’s priority banking product not only as a banking product but as a lifestyle, catching up on their previous OOH campaign.

"Stay ahead with unmatched investment insights" and “Master the world's most dynamic markets with a locals insight” are the overarching themes on all the billboards. "Stay ahead of the crowd with exclusive investments" is supplemented with slogans emphasizing "Get up to 5.75% profit p.a.", “More than 170 years of trusted expertise”, “International Weolth Hubs in 4 key regions”, “Your wealth isn't limited by borders, but empowered by them”, and "Up to AED 15,000 cashback."

Instead of emphasizing speed and immediate reward, the overall tone seems to play on the idea of futurism versus reactiveness while making the acquisition of wealth strategic over opportunistic. On the design front, there are two different worlds created through these billboards. In one group of billboards, there's skiing, with skiers reaching great heights. These posters are slick, wide, and obviously intended to be aspirational. In the other group, there's interaction; two men having coffee together in a traditional environment, set against the backdrop of Dubai's cityscape. This time, wealth is depicted not as something one can getaway with but something one can "speak" with the world, having found its groove in emerging markets like Dubai.

What's been striking about the execution is how much it relies on scale. These are no subtlety placed or sporadic formats. Instead, the brand chose to utilize massive horizontal structures that own entire vistas. The advertising effort is also free from technical terminology related to finances. There’s no in-depth product talk or busy lists of features. What the marketing effort achieves instead is to maintain clean text with an understandable emotional message: “Now’s your time for wealth.” It’s almost a phrase that talks more about timing than about numbers.

Contextually, Standard Chartered’s campaign lands at a moment where Dubai continues to market itself as a global financial hub for international investors, entrepreneurs, and high-net-worth individuals. Standard Chartered’s OOH campaign mirrors this perfectly in that there is nothing but global wealth. This is all about being global and above borders.

Instead of setting out to innovate in the outdoor industry, this campaign leverages what the outdoor industry in Dubai does well: scale, prestige, and environmental narratives. The campaign does not fight with or detract from a skyline; it uses it. In doing so, it situates Standard Chartered not simply as a bank in a city but as a part of a city’s own identity as a financial center.

The campaign was released in the second week of January, over hoardings and uni-poles in Dubai.