DBS Hong Kong — #TrustYourSpark: Protecting Dreams
Use this as a referenceProject Background: The Aspirations Behind Customers’ Savings
In wealth management, an account balance can represent a person’s hopes and plans as well as money. Through its #TrustYourSpark campaign, DBS Hong Kong wanted to tell the story of frontline wealth-management manager Lewis. His account describes helping someone who was not a DBS customer, showing how he understood his responsibility in responding to a suspected scam.
Visual Approach: Moving from Urgency to Reassurance
To convey a time-sensitive intervention, we continued the series’ contemporary visual language and made the risk visible:
Visualising Urgency: High-contrast colour and glitch-style motion graphics represented the confusion and anxiety of encountering a scam. Rapid flashes of “SOS” and a Chinese character meaning “suspicion” created a sense of pressure as the situation developed.
Professional Action with a Human Purpose: The film followed Lewis’s first-person account. As he chose to go further to help a non-DBS customer, the visual tone shifted from unease towards resolve. Images of his coordination with the Financial Crime and Security Services (FCSS) team connected formal procedures with a personal effort to help.
Restoring Reassurance: As the account reaches the successful interception of funds, red warning graphics give way to stable brand colours. This visual transition from urgency to resolution expressed the supporting role described in the story.
In Use: A Brand Story About Trust
The film presented DBS through a story combining professional responsibility and empathy. It connected a frontline employee’s care for customers’ assets with the aspirations those savings represented, reflecting the brand’s “Live more, Bank less” message.
About the DBS #TrustYourSpark Film: Protecting Assets and Aspirations
Year: 2024
Q&A
How did the film connect protecting assets with protecting dreams?+
Following the “Trust Your Spark” theme, the story gave wealth management a human context. It presented banking staff as people involved in customers’ longer-term plans, not only in account administration. Darkroom Studio connected the protection of savings with goals such as family life and starting a business, expressing the campaign’s message of support for those aspirations.
How did the camerawork convey reassurance and trust?+
Warm, steady colour and close-ups of banking staff’s focused expressions established a people-centred tone. The edit alternated scenes of careful professional work with B-roll of customers’ everyday lives, giving a visual form to the idea of support taking place behind the scenes.
Why might a financial brand use personal stories to introduce wealth-management services?+
A personal story can communicate a brand’s values beyond product features or performance figures. Connecting those values with customers’ life plans gives the subject a recognisable human dimension. For this film, the approach offered a way to discuss the relationship between trust, responsibility and individual aspirations.
- Client
- DBS Bank
- Project
- DBS #TrustYourSpark - The Guardian of Dreams (Lewis)
- Services
- Corporate brand film, storytelling and motion graphics
- Date
- 2024-08-20
