UnionPay: My First Time

UnionPay had built its presence in Myanmar with formal, corporate communications, which suited a payments network but did little to make younger consumers feel the brand was for them. The company wanted creative visual content with niche influencers who were genuinely connected to its target segments, and it wanted to try a tone that was far more fun and engaging than anything it had done before, without undermining trust in a financial brand.

Ruder Finn Era recruited influencers against the client's audience requirements and built a storyline around a single deliberately ambiguous phrase: their first time. Each creator began describing their first time in a way that let viewers assume the story was heading somewhere else entirely.

The reveal was the first time they used a credit or debit card, and how convenient paying has become with UnionPay. The misdirection gave a payments brand a joke to share, and the influencers' own audiences carried it, which produced engagement that formal product messaging had never achieved.