Interview with Dagmar Laub on the campaign “The River” 

Dagmar, you presented the four short films produced for the campaign “The River” to the public for the first time at Bankers Day. How nervous were you? 

I was certainly a little on edge beforehand, but that’s normal. We spent months developing this campaign, and a lot of hard work was put into it – not just by the team responsible, but also by our partners, especially the creative agency CRK. There were intensive discussions and long working weekends. Some ideas were thrown out, and new ones were thought up. Now I’m happy that the campaign has gone live, and I hope it’s well received.

What’s the process for developing a campaign like this? 

The films are a key element, but we also had to set up other formats and channels: a podcast, a campaign website, new social media channels. Everything has to fit together. There are essentially always two processes running in parallel, namely the creative one and coordination with all our stakeholders. On top of this, we had to keep up the Association’s normal communication – that was a lot of balls to juggle all at once.

Everyone knows that a lot of people have a say in an association. How did that work in this project? 

We have firmly embedded processes within the offices to ensure that the relevant bodies and expert groups are involved on an ongoing basis. We discussed things internally first before consulting the Board of Directors. The Financial Centre Promotion working group, made up of 11 representatives from various bank categories and regions, is on hand to support us. Everyone had their own clear expectations. Reconciling them all took patience, not to mention one or two unscheduled meetings. In the end, though, the campaign wouldn’t have been possible without everyone working together.

What did you find fascinating about the creative process? 

In the beginning, we were thinking of having different formats for different target groups, but it wasn’t long before we realised that there was no overarching concept holding them all together. That’s when we came up with the idea for “The River”. It was originally conceived as an online game, but we quickly abandoned that plan. Then everything started to flow from that. The films evolved during production too, they were optimised as we went along. A lot of creative people did great work. 

Were there moments when you just wanted to give up? 

No, not at all, but there were times when only my sense of humour kept me going...

Could you give us an example? 

We couldn’t rent a boat anywhere because an invasive species of mussel had infested Switzerland’s waterways, so we actually had to buy the little rowing boat you see in all the films. It needed to be cleaned professionally at a boat yard after each day of shooting so that we could get a permit to shoot on a different river the next day. 

Here’s another example: safety regulations required us to hire lifeguards for the Rhine shoot, but we couldn’t even send the boat out onto the river with the actors in it because it was too shallow. We ended up filming those scenes on dry land with the actors sitting in the boat under a parasol in the baking heat. That was a real challenge for the stylist.

It all sounds like a stressful but very exciting journey. 

Swiss Banking is entering uncharted territory with this campaign, we’ve never done anything like it before. I really want to thank my team – we had to get the campaign up and running with the staff we already had. A project like this can only work as a team effort, one person can’t do it alone. We all learned a lot and had plenty of new experiences that will help us to continue developing Swiss Banking’s communications.