Square has launched See You in the Neighbourhood, its first ever major Australian brand campaign, fronted by Naomi Watts, Daniel Ricciardo and Mick Fanning. The play puts local businesses in the spotlight rather than the product.
Celebrity gets you noticed. What you point the camera at decides whether being noticed is worth anything.
Square has launched See You in the Neighbourhood, its first ever major Australian brand campaign. The payments company best known for its card readers has enlisted Naomi Watts, former Formula One driver Daniel Ricciardo and surfer Mick Fanning to front it. The twist is where the camera points. The stars are the hook, but the campaign puts local businesses in the spotlight rather than the hardware.
That choice is the strategy. Square sells to small businesses, so the campaign frames the brand around the neighbourhoods those businesses serve. Familiar Australian faces buy attention. The local business framing gives that attention somewhere useful to land.
Why it matters
This is a global payments brand choosing a local story for a local market, and that is the lesson worth taking. Plenty of international brands run the same creative in Australia that they run everywhere else and wonder why it lands flat. Square built something specific to the market it wants to win. For Australian businesses watching, the takeaway is not the celebrity budget. It is the discipline of matching the message to who you actually sell to.
Australian names fronting Square's first major local campaign: Naomi Watts, Daniel Ricciardo and Mick Fanning
What to do about it
Square spent big to look small and local, and for a brand that lives inside neighbourhood businesses, that is the right kind of expensive.