How waiting became a sensation

The challenge

NLB Bank has mKlik, an app that substitutes every visit to the bank. You can do it all from your phone. And NLB needed everyone to know about it in a smart and innovative way.

So, we thought to ourselves banking has many things people don't particularly enjoy doing — and waiting is probably at the top of the list.

And instead of starting with a banking message, we started with a character.

Mile – Da počekam (Mile - I'll wait in English) was created as a seemingly real “professional waiter” — a man whose entire job was to wait in line for other people for money.

The challenge was simple: make people care about a man whose profession was waiting.

The strategy

We deliberately kept NLB out of the picture.

The campaign launched as a teaser, with Mile appearing across social and digital touchpoints as an unusual, instantly likeable character. His dead-serious attitude towards his completely absurd profession created curiosity and conversation, while the absence of a visible brand left people wondering:

Over the following weeks, Mile evolved from an unknown character into an internet sensation, attracting attention and winning the sympathy of audiences in Macedonia and beyond.

Then came the reveal.

Potential clients of Mile started canceling their appointments for waiting in line in a bank. Mile found out that they started doing everything through NLB's app.

The reveal transformed the curiosity generated by the teaser into a clear product story: why wait when you can bank digitally?

The results

The teaser campaign successfully created something advertising rarely gets to create: an audience that is eager to watch what's next.

Within 2 weeks, Mile generated over 3 million views, 66K shares, 22K likes, and reached 528,600 accounts on Instagram in a country of less than 1.8M people! National TV stations were calling for interviews along with hundreds of people who dialed his number (on a mobile sitting in our office) during the teaser phase which proved to be the most successful one in the country's history.

The reveal didn't end the story. It gave Mile a new mission. From a professional waiter, he became a digital beginner, learning how to use NLB's mobile banking services together with the audience.

The campaign will continue through a series of short-form videos covering everyday banking functionalities.

What began as a question — “Who is Mile?” became a much bigger one - “Why are you still waiting in line?”