ICICIDirect: Financial education on YouTube

The campaign showcases two animated characters, Gyano and Mobo, who showcase in an interactive way how people need to plan their financial goals.

ICICI Securities, the integrated securities firm, has launched an animated YouTube campaign for its portal ICICIDirect.com, to educate users on how to attain their financial goals. The campaign highlights two animated characters, Gyano and Mobo, who work out financial solutions for consumers and help them realise their dreams.

Conceptualised and developed by the internal team of ICICIDirect and Oh2two Media Pvt. Ltd., the video showcases Gyano the magician and Mobo the money boss. The video asks people to choose a dream wish, after which Gyano showcases a shortcut to fulfil that dream. Mobo, on the other hand, preaches logical solutions, thus promoting the ICICIDirect tool which calculates the exact amount the user needs to invest to fulfil that dream (

).

The video also promotes a Facebook app which redirects to a game called 'Virtual Stocks' where Facebook visitors who 'like' the page can experiment, experience and learn stock market during live trading hours in a safe environment, thereby eliminating all possibilities of monetary loss.

The idea is to help people understand investments and give them a tool to plan their needs. Additionally, ICICIDirect will also update their Facebook page with important financial news developments like policy decisions, inflation and Budget (

Explaining the objective behind the campaign, Vineet Arora, executive vice-president and head, product distribution, ICICI Securities tells afaqs! that social media is a very influential medium, especially with the youth.
"We decided to embrace this platform to create a more personalised relationship as well as provide a fun , interactive and safe way to learn about personal finance as well as equity markets. We believe that this format will encourage systematic thinking about goal-based investments and Virtual Stocks will help investors overcome their fear and understand the stock market better,"

he adds.

The campaign will also be promoted on Twitter and Facebook to engage with ICICI's growing audience of followers interested in investor education.

Over the past few years, ICICIDirect has been focusing on investor education through its classroom based training programmes at ICICIDirect Centre for Financial Learning across 45 Indian cities as well as online tutorials.

Speaking about whether ICICI Securities plans to support this activity on TV, print and radio, Arora says that based on the success of social media, other opportunities will be evaluated.