'Sound Of Spending' Tool Transforms Data into a Soundtrack of Canadians’ Spending Patterns

Canadians can now feel more in control of their spending thanks to a new campaign which combines data with a universally understood medium, music. The campaign is by Interac, one of Canada’s most trusted financial services brands that facilitates debit and electronic money transfers.

Interac Sound of Spending is an initiative developed with long-time creative agency partner, Zulu Alpha Kilo, as an interactive extension of the brand’s new InLife creative platform.  The payments brand has created a tool that can convert shopping trends into music to give consumers a better understanding of their shopping highs and lows.

For launch, Interac analyzed a year and a half of Canadian shopping trends based on anonymized Interac Debit transactions over the course of the pandemic. Debit spending on food, home, entertainment, travel and shopping were mapped against different musical instruments, revealing the changing spending habits of Canadians over time, and demonstrating the beginning of the economy recovery through rising shopping levels or ‘notes’ in recent months. 

In the national track, consumers can hear and see the grocery shopping spike at the pandemic outset, as well as a rise in spending on wellness and home goods as consumer shopping habits evolved. Interac also created an online tool that lets Canadians generate a song unique to them by entering amounts across the same four key spending categories at www.interac.ca/soundofspending. Depending how you spend month to month, the sound of your spending will be very different.

“Helping Canadians better understand, and in turn stay in control of their money, is a key part of our new InLife platform. Leveraging data and technology to create an emotive output like music allows us to connect with our tech-savvy audience in a unique way,” says Matt Houghton, Director of Digital and Integrated Marketing at Interac. “We’ve never seen shopping trends brought to life this way – it makes you stop and think about how we spend as both a nation and as individuals.”

“Not only is Interac here for Canadians, but we want to reinforce our day-to-day connection with them in their own language. Music is one universal language we all can relate to, whether we have a deep grasp of our finances or are just learning to navigate our spending,” said Wain Choi, Executive Creative Director, Zulu Alpha Kilo.

The campaign microsite is supported with paid assets including Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, native content and a new Spotify podcast offering based on targeting specific affinities. Media for Sound of Spending was planned by Media Experts, with PR efforts led by Hill+Knowlton. The campaign will run for six weeks, and the online tool can be accessed on an ongoing basis.