SNS Bank is the first big dutch bank to start offering their customers interest on their normal bank accounts. To promote this new offering, ad agency Bone from The Netherlands created an unique protest.
Everybody could sign up for the protest via their Facebook or Twitter accounts. After which their profile pictures were connected to various live rich media banners that were being run on sites like msn.nl and telegraaf.nl.
The Rugby World Cup is currently underway in New Zealand, and there is no better time than now for Lynx to do what they do best in their advertising: push sex appeal front and center. Reportedly passing 600,000 views in its first week, it suggests plenty of people are “learning” the rules of rugby.
Mechanically, it is Rugby 101 delivered as a faux-serious rules explainer, with the on-field demonstrations staged for maximum attention rather than maximum clarity.
In mass-reach men’s grooming marketing, this kind of “rules explained” format is a reliable way to ride a cultural moment and turn it into shareable entertainment.
When a big tournament is on, casual viewers suddenly need a quick refresher. Lynx hijacks that natural demand with a piece of content that looks like a helpful explainer, but behaves like a viral film.
The viewing motivation is not really education. It is surprise, cheek, and the simple social impulse to forward something that feels slightly taboo, especially when it is framed as “sport content” during a major sports moment.
This is classic Lynx branding: confidence, flirtation, and provocation, packaged into a format that is easy to justify watching because it is “about rugby rules.” The product is not the story. The personality is the product.
It is a Rugby 101 style explainer video released during the Rugby World Cup that uses provocative on-field demonstrations to turn a rules refresher into viral entertainment.
Because more people are searching for quick rules explanations during a tournament, so the format earns attention without needing heavy media spend to explain itself.
Not primarily. The “rules” wrapper gives it a reason to exist, but the real goal is shareable entertainment that fits the Lynx brand tone.
Simple premise, instantly recognizable format, and a payoff that people feel compelled to forward as a joke or talking point.
If you can piggyback on a live cultural event, you can spend less time building context and more time maximizing the share moment.
Shopping is 24×7. It happens everywhere, not just in a store or on a website.
The intersection of smartphones, social media, online and offline shopping puts the consumer squarely in control. The shopping journey is no longer linear. Discovery can start in a social feed, comparison can happen on a phone while standing in front of a shelf, and purchase can happen without ever “going to checkout”.
That shift is exactly what PayPal leans into with a hype video depicting what the future of shopping might look like. The story is not only about paying faster. It is about payment disappearing into the experience, powered by PayPal’s next generation payment platforms as they aim to re-imagine money.
We already see the building blocks all around us.
What changes is not only how you pay. It is when you pay. Or more precisely, whether you even notice it.
In commerce ecosystems, the player that owns identity, trust, and the payment layer can influence far more than checkout. It can shape the full shopping journey.
When consumers can shop anytime and anywhere, the competitive battlefield shifts.
In this model, money is not the centerpiece. The experience is.
PayPal’s narrative previews a broader shift. Commerce becomes ambient.
The hype is the packaging. The strategic message underneath is that payment platforms want to sit one layer deeper in the journey. Not at the end, but throughout.
They aim to become the connective tissue between identity, intent, and transaction.
This is why the video matters. It is not a product demo. It is a stake in the ground. The future of shopping is continuous, and the future of money is embedded.
If payment disappears, a few questions matter more than ever.
The brands and retailers who win treat checkout as a symptom. Not a destination.
Payment becomes a background step. The shopper focuses on choosing and receiving, while the transaction happens with minimal explicit action.
It combines identity, context, discovery, and transaction capability in one always-on device, collapsing steps that used to be separate.
If the payment layer owns identity and trust, it can also mediate choice. Retailers risk becoming interchangeable unless they add differentiated experience value.
To design end-to-end journeys that reduce friction and increase relevance. When paying fades away, experience quality becomes more visible.
Trust and permission. Invisible payment only scales when consumers feel in control and understand when and why transactions occur.
