OnDeck: a $10K challenge that made a national lender local

OnDeck is a national online lender to small businesses. In Denver it had scale but no local identity: awareness in the metro was low, and the audience it most needed, brick-and-mortar owners looking for funding to expand and hire, had no particular reason to know the name.

The brief was to build awareness among those owners through television, online, vertical trade and radio; to surface customer success stories that would carry the wider marketing effort; and to find local advertising and sponsorship that was on brand rather than merely available.

There was no news. A national lender operating in a metro is not a story a local business desk will write, and the engagement ran only four months — with roughly one month to create something actually worth covering.

• Connect a large national brand to a specific local niche without sounding national.
• Manufacture a legitimate reason for Denver press to write, then execute it at speed.
• Run earned media and paid advertising off one idea so neither undercut the other.
• Stand up a contest, rules, judging, an event, creative and media outreach inside a month.

Cast Influence created, promoted and led OnDeck's first ONWARD Denver Challenge over a three-month period: a pitch competition awarding $10,000, $5,000 and $3,000 to small business owners, structured the way accelerators award tech startups. Scope ran from the idea through to the event floor.

• Event concept, project plan, run of show and floor schematic
• Contest rules, scoring parameters and winner selection
• Third-party judges secured from Business For Breakfast, the SBDC and the BBB
• Media alerts before, during and after the Challenge
• Eventbrite build, landing-page copywriting and RSVP management
• Advertising counsel, vendor introductions and creative production
• Photography direction on the day

Rather than pitch a lender, we built something worth covering and let the coverage carry the brand. A contest with real money and named local judges gave reporters a story with stakes, gave small-business owners a reason to take part, and gave OnDeck a way to demonstrate its stated focus on small business instead of asserting it.

Third-party endorsement did the credibility work. Judges from Business For Breakfast, the SBDC and the BBB meant the Challenge was not OnDeck talking about itself. Earned coverage and paid placement then ran off the same idea and the same creative, so the newsletter ad and the news article reinforced each other in the same week, in the same outlets.

Earned coverage landed across the Denver and Boulder business press: the Daily Camera, two pieces in ColoradoBiz, the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, two Business For Breakfast radio segments, Creative Mornings, and two Denver Business Journal announcements of new leadership hires. The InfluenceNow podcast featured the winners, Luckyleo Dancewear. A FOX31 Denver customer profile of Wild Women Winery ran as paid placement.

Placement was then pushed beyond the article itself. The SBDC in both Boulder and Denver carried nomination information in newsletters and pinned the contest page to the top of Facebook. ColoradoBiz ran the earned piece as the lead item on its site, first in its newsletter, and across social, alongside the paid ads.

• Creative produced in house: event deck, large-format presentation checks, winners badge, directional signage, and online graphics for Eventbrite, social and advertising
• Outdoor and transit through Lamar, introduced by Cast at a substantial saving against competing vendors
• Westword and ColoradoBiz in print and online; Denver Chamber event sponsorship
• A 30-minute OnDeck pitch slot secured at Creative Mornings