Who: Corporate spend management platform Float, with Berners Bowie Lee for strategy and creative, Epitaph Group for media. Brand design by Renga.

What: A new B2B awareness campaign for the one-year-old fintech brand, representing its first brand awareness push. Float is a bundled solution linking a corporate card to spend management software. It currently has approximately 1,000 corporate customers, representing thousands of users.

When & Where:The campaign went live on May 9, running for six weeks with a combination of national digital (display and paid social), complemented by out-of-home in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto, as well as transit ads in Toronto.

Why: The campaign is an awareness play aimed at people in CEO/founder and finance roles with companies, said Float’s head of marketing Amrita Gurney. Its goal is to drive traffic to the website and increase lead generation.

How: All of the creative features one of four business personas representing what Gurney describes as the “healthy tension” between a company’s finance team and the employees spending money.

The Bottle-necker is someone in finance who wants to control spending; the Corporate Card Sharer is lax when it comes to control of the card; the Big, Big, Spender is self-evident; and the Receipt Loser. The latter is probably the most relatable, said Gurney, since it’s very common for employees to lose track of receipts.

Outdoor? For B2B? Out-of-home offered an “unexpected” alternative, said Gurney, since start-ups tend to rely primarily on digital for communication. The ads are in areas that are home to start-ups and scale-ups, such as Queen St. and Spadina Ave. and Liberty Village in Toronto, as well as central Vancouver, and corridors where senior decision-makers are likely to travel, such Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport and Calgary International Airport.

Why Berners Bowie Lee: Gurney previously worked with Berners Bowie Lee’s founding partner/creative Devon Williamson, and had also been impressed with the agency’s work with brands attempting to bring something “very fresh and new” to the market, including last year’s deliberately bad work for Toronto houseplant retailer Chive. “We felt it was a good fit with our strategy,” said Gurney.

And we quote: “This is our first big brand campaign, and our goal is to reach Canadian businesses that are interested in changing the way that they manage their business spend.” — Amrita Gurney, head of marketing, Float