ANZ · TBWA\New Zealand · New Zealand · October 2026
Most business advertising gives you the answer and hopes you'll remember who said it. ANZ gives you the question and keeps the answer. TBWA\New Zealand's campaign for The Sauce, the bank's business insights service, shows spending trends with the crucial detail redacted. It's a bank admitting it knows something you don't, which is exactly the point of the product.
The Challenge
The Sauce combines aggregated, anonymised spending data and economic insights, tailored to a business's industry and location, with advice from ANZ specialists. ANZ needed business owners to see why that wider market view is worth having, and to take a meeting about it.
What They Did
One billboard reports that spend at [redacted] in Auckland rose 12% over the past year, leaving out the category behind the trend. Other outdoor and digital executions reveal a trend, then cut the detail that would tell you where the opportunity is. On radio, business owners describe how The Sauce shaped their decisions before the key details are bleeped. Print runs in Kia Ora magazine, NZME hosts a business roundtable, and regional managers hand high-value prospects bespoke hot-sauce packs made with Culley's.
Why It Works
Gap ads usually set a puzzle you can solve on the spot: you see Laurel and supply Hardy. ANZ's gap can't be closed from memory. The only way to learn what rose 12% in Auckland is to talk to the bank. The redaction turns a product description into a product demonstration, because the feeling of missing what your competitors know is the problem The Sauce sells against.
Creative Deviance: Unexpectedness
ANZ shows you their banking expertise, then takes it away. The surprise has a purpose: the black bar makes the product's value visible, because the thing you're denied is the thing The Sauce provides.
The Tactic
Creative Use of Absence and Omission → Invite the Audience to Complete It
What to Steal
Give the sales team something to hand over. The hot-sauce packs turn the product's name into an object a regional manager can put on a prospect's desk. A campaign built for billboards still needs a reason for the first meeting, and a well-named product can supply its own prop.
The Question That Could Get You There
What could we leave unfinished so people fill in the missing piece?
Or, more pointedly: what could we show people they don't know, so that we're the only way to find out?
