ARCHIVEHow ICICI Bank Used a Smart Bench to Sell Home Loans in India
Make Room For More is a May 2018 experiential film campaign created for ICICI Bank by Blink Digital in India, built around a mechanically expanding bench — called The Bench — that physically grew to seat an additional person whenever it was full, serving as a live metaphor for the bank's Step Up Home Loans product.
The campaign deploys a single, elegant physical installation to communicate a financial proposition that is notoriously difficult to dramatise: the idea that a home loan can grow with a borrower's ambitions. ICICI Bank positioned the Step Up Home Loans product as a flexible instrument that expands capacity rather than fixing limits, and The Bench translates that promise into a tactile, observable moment. When a stranger sat down and the bench smoothly extended to accommodate them, the product insight became experiential rather than declarative.
Placed at R City Mall and selected ICICI Bank branches across India, the installation operated in high-footfall environments where the public encounter was unscripted and spontaneous. The campaign was documented as a film — a single media asset capturing real reactions to the expanding bench — making it simultaneously an ambient installation and a shareable content piece. In India, where home ownership carries deep cultural and aspirational weight, the creative choice to stage the idea in a public space rather than a television studio gave it immediate social and emotional currency.
The campaign earned a Silver award in the Best Use of Experimental Media category at the 2018 DMA Asia ECHO Awards, with the award credited to Khushboo Bhatt, according to Clapboard's editorial records. Clapboard rates Make Room For More at 73 out of 100, reflecting its conceptual clarity and production originality relative to the broader canon of financial services advertising.
ICICI Bank competes in one of the most structurally competitive retail lending environments in Asia. In India's banking sector during FY2018, total advances across more than 35 banks reached approximately ₹83.37 trillion, according to data cited on Scribd drawing from Reserve Bank of India figures. Private-sector banks — the segment in which ICICI Bank operates — held approximately 30.37% of total advances at that time, per the same source, giving them a disproportionately large share of retail lending relative to their deposit base.
State Bank of India remains the dominant force in Indian retail lending. According to analysis published on Lexology, the four largest banks accounted for approximately 76% of total retail loans as of March 2018, with SBI's share of retail loans growing from 22.8% in March 2016 to 28.8% in March 2018. Against that concentration, ICICI Bank's strategic imperative in 2018 was not simply to grow loan volumes but to differentiate on product design and customer perception — particularly among aspirational first-time homebuyers who may feel excluded by rigid loan structures.
The Step Up Home Loans product addresses that tension directly by offering a repayment structure that begins lower and increases over time, matching a borrower's expected income trajectory. In India, where a large proportion of the salaried workforce is in the early stages of career growth, this product logic is broadly relevant. The Make Room For More campaign amplifies that logic by staging it in a public space — bypassing broadcast media and reaching consumers through an unexpected, participatory encounter. ICICI Bank's 2018 strategic focus on digital banking, technology, and innovation-led customer experience, as documented on the bank's own institutional communications per icicibank.in, makes Blink Digital's experimental approach a coherent extension of corporate direction rather than a standalone creative outlier.
The Bench is a mechanically engineered installation designed to expand its seating capacity in real time when a new person approaches a full seat. The core creative mechanism is the bench itself: a purpose-built piece of furniture that visibly and smoothly extends, creating a physical demonstration of the campaign idea rather than a verbal or visual representation of it. The craft challenge was ensuring the mechanical expansion felt natural and unhurried — close enough to ordinary bench behaviour that the reaction of real passersby remained authentic and uncoached.
Blink Digital's team on Make Room For More included Dooj Ramchandani as Chief Creative Officer, Pooja Joshi as Copywriter, and Rikki Agarwal as Account Director, according to Clapboard's production lineage records. The film documenting the installation was directed by Abhijit Gajwani, per the same source. The creative team's decision to capture the installation as a single film asset — rather than building an extended content series — reflects a discipline that concentrates the campaign's impact into one definitive piece of evidence. The film format allows the bench's mechanical surprise to land cleanly without editorial dilution.
Placement at R City Mall in Mumbai and within selected ICICI Bank branches ensured the installation encountered two distinct audiences: general consumers engaging in a leisure context, and existing bank customers present for transactional reasons. The contrast between those two environments — one ambient and unprompted, the other brand-owned and purposeful — gives the campaign a layered reach that a single location could not achieve. The decision to film rather than simply photograph the installation also captures the temporal dimension of the expansion: the bench's movement is the message, and movement requires film. Production credits for wider post-production and sound design on the Make Room For More film are not publicly documented beyond the core team named above.
ARCHIVEMake Room For More earned a Silver award in the Best Use of Experimental Media category at the 2018 DMA Asia ECHO Awards, with the award credited to Khushboo Bhatt, according to Clapboard's editorial records. No verified performance data — including reach figures, loan application uplift, or foot-traffic metrics tied directly to The Bench installation — is publicly available for this campaign.
The DMA Asia ECHO Awards recognition is nonetheless a structurally meaningful signal. The Best Use of Experimental Media category evaluates campaigns on the precision with which an unconventional channel or format serves a measurable marketing objective, making a Silver at that level an implicit validation of the campaign's strategic coherence, not merely its creative novelty. That the award was registered under the campaign's association with ICICI Bank's Step Up Home Loans product — rather than as a general brand awareness exercise — suggests the judging panel read the bench mechanic as genuinely connected to a product truth.
Assessed structurally, Make Room For More demonstrates several characteristics associated with effective experiential finance advertising. The installation converts an abstract product benefit — loan capacity that grows — into a physical, observable event. It generates genuine, unscripted human reaction, which is the raw material of credible documentary film content. It operates in a high-footfall retail environment, maximising incidental exposure. And it produces a single, replicable film asset that extends the campaign's reach beyond the physical installation site. Clapboard rates Make Room For More at 73 out of 100, reflecting strong conceptual clarity and production originality, with the score constrained by the campaign's limited documented reach and the absence of publicly verified outcome metrics.
Make Room For More is a May 2018 experiential campaign by ICICI Bank, created by Blink Digital in India. It used a mechanically expanding bench — called The Bench — placed at R City Mall and selected bank branches to promote Step Up Home Loans, capturing public reactions in a single film asset, according to Clapboard's editorial records.
The Bench was a purpose-built, mechanically expanding installation that extended its seating when full to accommodate an additional person. Placed at R City Mall and ICICI Bank branches in India, it served as a live metaphor for the bank's Step Up Home Loans product, which offers repayment structures that grow with a borrower's income, per Clapboard's records.
Blink Digital created Make Room For More for ICICI Bank in India in May 2018. The core team included Chief Creative Officer Dooj Ramchandani, Copywriter Pooja Joshi, Account Director Rikki Agarwal, and director Abhijit Gajwani, according to Clapboard's production lineage documentation.
Make Room For More won a Silver award in the Best Use of Experimental Media category at the 2018 DMA Asia ECHO Awards, with the award credited to Khushboo Bhatt, according to Clapboard's editorial records. The recognition validated the campaign's use of an unconventional physical installation to serve a specific product objective for ICICI Bank in India.
Make Room For More promoted ICICI Bank's Step Up Home Loans, a product designed to offer flexible repayment structures that increase over time in line with a borrower's expected income growth. The expanding bench mechanic visualised this proposition directly, making an abstract financial benefit physically observable to consumers in India, per Clapboard's campaign records.
Clapboard rates Make Room For More at 73 out of 100. The score reflects strong conceptual clarity and production originality in translating a home loan product benefit into a live physical installation, constrained by limited documented reach and the absence of publicly verified performance outcome metrics for the India campaign.
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