Unicredit Romania Turns Mobile Banking Into a Remote Control Experience
Unicredit Tiriac Bank's 'Control Your Bank' is a May 2014 digital campaign created by MRM Worldwide Romania and McCann for the Romanian market, inviting users to control a fictional bank branch and its employees through smartphone gestures via a dedicated interactive website, as a means of promoting the bank's Mobile B@nking application.
The campaign centred on a dedicated platform, controlyourbank.ro, where a user's smartphone functioned as a literal remote control for an on-screen branch environment. Visitors to the site could use touch-based gestures to manipulate the fictional setting and the people within it, turning what might otherwise have been a straightforward product demonstration into a participatory entertainment experience. The mechanic was enabled by a specially developed interactive application connecting two internet-enabled devices in real time, as reported by IQads.
In Romania, the banking sector in 2013 and 2014 was dominated by a small number of large institutions, with the top three banks holding approximately 40% of total sector assets, according to data cited in academic research published via Seaopenresearch Eu. Unicredit Tiriac Bank occupied roughly fifth position in the Romanian market during this period, holding approximately 7.6% to 7.9% of banking sector assets, per the same source. Within this competitive environment, the bank sought to differentiate its digital proposition by making the act of discovering mobile banking genuinely engaging rather than instructional. The campaign was classified as a digital medium execution and represented one of the more technically ambitious interactive formats deployed in Romanian financial advertising at the time. It was submitted to the Ads of the World archive and covered by trade publication IQads on 8 May 2014, giving it documented industry visibility in the Romanian market.
Unicredit Tiriac Bank designed the Control Your Bank campaign to close a specific awareness and adoption gap around its Mobile B@nking application among Romanian consumers. The strategic premise rested on a clear consumer insight: explaining the utility of a mobile banking interface through conventional advertising risks abstraction, whereas placing the interface itself at the centre of the experience makes the proposition self-evident.
The second-screen mechanic was not decorative. By requiring users to pick up their smartphones and use gesture-based inputs to interact with controlyourbank.ro, the campaign created a direct behavioural rehearsal of the very action it was trying to encourage — reaching for a phone to manage a banking task. This approach reflected a broader shift in digital campaign thinking in Central and Eastern Europe during 2013 and 2014, as smartphone penetration accelerated and brands began exploring participatory formats beyond display and pre-roll.
In the Romanian banking market, Unicredit Tiriac Bank competed directly against BCR, backed by Erste Group, which held approximately 16.2% of sector assets in 2014 according to seaopenresearch.eu, making it the market leader. BRD, affiliated with Groupe Société Générale, also held a substantial share, per the same source. Against these entrenched rivals, Unicredit's digital-first campaign signalled an attempt to differentiate on innovation and user experience rather than on rate or branch density. The broader UniCredit group had demonstrated confidence in brand-building at scale through its UEFA Champions League sponsorship, which generated approximately five billion contacts over two seasons and achieved a five-percentage-point increase in aided group-level brand awareness between November 2009 and November 2010, as reported by adhugger.net. The Romania-specific Control Your Bank campaign drew on this group-level brand equity while addressing a distinctly local digital adoption objective.
The creative execution of Control Your Bank rested on a single, well-defined conceit: the bank branch as a controllable object. MRM Worldwide Romania and McCann built the campaign around the familiar environment of a retail bank — staff, furniture, the choreography of a branch visit — and then handed control of that environment to the user's smartphone.
The interaction design required two simultaneous technical layers. A user's mobile device, once connected to controlyourbank.ro, transmitted gesture inputs that were interpreted by the platform and translated into visible on-screen actions within the fictional branch, as reported by IQads. This real-time synchronisation between a handheld device and a browser-based environment was a technically demanding proposition for a Romanian digital production in 2014, and its successful execution formed the backbone of the campaign's creative credibility.
On-screen talent included Anca Nuță, identified by IQads as UniCredit Director of Identity and Communication, whose presence lent the fictional branch a degree of institutional authenticity. The coverage by journalist Ionuț Maxim in IQads on 8 May 2014 provided the primary trade record of the campaign's mechanics and intent, as documented by that publication. The campaign contained one media asset, suggesting a tightly consolidated creative output rather than a multi-execution rollout. Production credits beyond the agency attributions to MRM Worldwide Romania and McCann are not publicly documented in available sources. The creative tone balanced humour — inherent in the premise of controlling a person's office chair remotely, as described by IQads — with a functional demonstration of what mobile-first banking interaction could feel like, making the product's capabilities tangible through play rather than instruction.
No verified performance data for the Control Your Bank campaign is publicly available. No entries or wins for this campaign have been identified in the records of Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, or the Clio Awards. Its Clapboard Score of 52 out of 100 reflects a mid-range assessment, consistent with a campaign that demonstrates genuine creative and technical ambition but lacks the documented results or awards recognition that typically elevate scores into the upper tier.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness case rests on the quality of its mechanic and its alignment with the stated objective of driving Mobile B@nking awareness and adoption in Romania. The second-screen interaction model is inherently measurable — session length, gesture completions, and return visits are all trackable within the controlyourbank.ro platform environment — yet none of these figures have been made public. Unicredit Tiriac Bank's asset share in Romania grew from approximately 7.6% in 2013 to approximately 7.9% in 2014, according to seaopenresearch.eu, representing modest but positive momentum in a concentrated market. Whether the Control Your Bank campaign contributed to that trajectory cannot be established from available evidence.
What the campaign does demonstrate is a willingness, on the part of both the bank and its agencies MRM Worldwide Romania and McCann, to invest in technically sophisticated interactive formats at a moment when the Romanian digital advertising market was still developing its capacity for such work. The trade coverage in IQads confirms the campaign reached the professional audience it needed to influence perceptions of Unicredit's innovation credentials within Romania's financial sector.
Control Your Bank was a May 2014 digital campaign by Unicredit Tiriac Bank, created by MRM Worldwide Romania and McCann. It invited Romanian users to control a fictional bank branch using smartphone gestures on the dedicated site controlyourbank.ro, promoting the bank's Mobile B@nking application through an interactive second-screen experience.
Users visited controlyourbank.ro and connected their smartphones to the platform. The phone then functioned as a remote control, translating touch-based gestures into on-screen actions within a fictional bank branch environment. A specially developed application handled real-time synchronisation between the two internet-enabled devices, as reported by IQads.
The campaign was created by MRM Worldwide Romania and McCann for Unicredit Tiriac Bank. Both agencies are credited across the Ads of the World archive and IQads coverage from May 2014. The campaign was classified as a digital medium execution and contained one media asset, per Clapboard's editorial record.
No awards have been documented for Control Your Bank. No entries or wins appear in publicly available records for Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, D&AD, The One Show, or the Clio Awards. The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 52 out of 100, reflecting its creative ambition without confirmed industry recognition.
Control Your Bank launched in May 2014 alongside Unicredit's Restart Romania initiative, which ran from April to May 2014 with McCann Erickson Romania, as reported by adhugger.net. Both campaigns ran in the same market window, suggesting a period of concentrated brand and product activity by Unicredit Tiriac Bank in Romania during mid-2014.
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