The New York landscape has, for many years, been dominated by the financial industry, and the impact of the current financial meltdown can be seen on every street corner.
While many retailers have struggled or shut down, HSBC’s media team saw opportunity. Three years ago, JWT launched HSBC’s “Different points of view” campaign, which covered New York with “scaffolding” advertising. This was the first time a major brand had used the ever present scaffolding of NYC as an advertising medium, and it was very effective at creating huge impact for little cost.
Since then, the city has banned the use of scaffolding for advertising. Realizing that street presence is really important to “the world’s local bank,” the media team looked for alternatives. It turned out that the owners of empty retail spaces were more than willing to rent us their storefronts to run our new HSBC creative—and with so many spaces available, we had our pick of the best foot-traffic locations for significantly less than conventional media vehicles.
New York has the largest single-city economy in the United States and the second largest in the world (after Tokyo). And according to 
