NAB - The Honesty Experiments

Hot on the heels of the recent Honest Cities Experiment from Honest Tea (courtesy of Nicola Young, worth checking out more here), comes a set of Honesty Experiments from Australian bank NAB:

Australian bank NAB recently launched conducted a series of 'honesty experiments', and published the results on YouTube. NAB explain the rationale for the experiments on its website: 'At NAB, we believe that Australians are an honest lot and that they deserve honest credit cards to match. So just how honest are Australians?'. A series of outdoor experiments were secretly filmed, then uploaded to YouTube.


The first experiment tested whether Australians would do the right thing if given too much change. NAB set up a coffee stand in Melbourne, and the barista deliberately gave them $5 too much change in each transaction. Everyone gave the money back. When the barista was deliberately rude to customers, 91% still returned the extra change.


For the second, the bank left wallets filled with cash on the streets of Sydney. Incredibly, 88% were returned. For the final experiment, NAB asked someone to deliberately drop $20 on a busy Melbourne street - 95% of people went out of the way to return the money.


The campaign was created by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, who previously launched a hugely successful public Break Up campaign for NAB, which won the PR Grand Prix award at the Cannes Lions festival.

I love how this campaign took it one step further by introducing more barriers to entry/reasons not to be honest such as the obnoxious barista, the guy with headphones, more money in the wallet, etc.  There's also a nice use of external annotations to then drive people to the NAB site to find out more.


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