Karur Vysya Bank

Smart Way to Bank

Digital Self Defence home page banner

Amplifying a century-old bank's commitment to social responsibility through a precision engineered multi-platform digital campaign.

Partnership since July 2024 · Agency: SearchMadarth®

About the client

Karur Vysya Bank (KVB) is one of India's most respected private sector banks, with a legacy spanning over a century. Deeply rooted in South India, KVB has built its reputation on integrity, customer-centricity and community values.

The Ask

As cyber fraud and digital scams grew more sophisticated across India, KVB wanted to step beyond conventional banking communication and take on the role of a genuine community protector. The brief was to run a CSR-led awareness campaign in and around Trichy that would teach everyday people, especially those newer to digital banking, how to recognise and defend themselves against online fraud, all while reflecting KVB's century-old promise of trust.

The Challenge

Fraud-awareness content is easy to make forgettable. Most safety messaging either gets lost as fine print or feels too alarming to hold attention. For a legacy bank like KVB, the challenge was to make "Digital Self Defence" feel urgent and useful without feeling preachy and to do it across the platforms where Trichy's audience genuinely spends time: social feeds, search and regional OTT screens.

The Solution

We built a 360-degree awareness campaign, "Digital Self Defence," running from 21 September to 5 December 2025, across four platforms working in tandem:

Creatively, every asset centred on the same simple, memorable device: a masked "digital thief" motif that dramatised common fraud tactics, paired with the KVB shield to reinforce that the bank stands as the audience's first line of defence.

Here's what we did

On Meta, we ran seven ad variants, split between profile-visit-optimised TVCs and native Trichy-market cuts, so we could learn quickly which length and hook drove the strongest engagement, then shifted spend toward what worked. Targeting leaned into KVB's core banking audience, 18–34-year-olds, who are both the most digitally active and most exposed to fraud risk, while placements spanned Instagram Reels, Stories, Feed and Facebook.

On Google, we layered TrueView video against curated finance-intent audiences, including Financial Services, Fixed Deposit and Banking & Finance segments, alongside a Display layer for broad, low-cost reach and a CTV pilot for the living-room screen.

On OTT, we went hyper-local: SunNXT carried the message inside Tamil-language entertainment that Trichy households already trust, while JioHotStar Sports extended reach through live cricket viewership, one of the single highest-attention windows on Indian screens.

Across all four platforms, the campaign delivered ~12.7 crore total impressions and ~₹30 lakh in total media investment. Here's how that broke down platform by platform.

Meta (Instagram & Facebook)