When was the last time you had a meaningful interaction with an employee at your bank? If you can’t remember you’re probably not alone. Following the banking crisis of 2008/9 banking has become more associated with corporate greed than customer service. This posed a particularly interesting problem for TD Bank who has built their brand around comfort.

The idea that a large, multinational bank would reach out to its 12 million Canadian customers in a pure display of altruism goes against every notion we have of banking in the 21st century. TD Bank, however, accomplished this by doing something most would think is outrageous for a bank, and got downright neighborly with its customers.

How? TD reimagined the mundane task of visiting the Automated Teller Machine and instead surprised customers by creating the hyper personalized, gift dispensing, thank you machine. With no perceivable difference, this machine interacted with customers in a thoughtful, engaging and personal way. The thanking machine visited four branches across Canada and leveraged the staff’s deep knowledge of some of the bank’s loyal customers who had compelling stories to tell – customers like Christine, a single mother who works tireless to provide for her family and Dorothy, who wires money every month to her daughter in Trinidad who’s suffering from cancer.

TD’s Thanking Machine surprised Christine with an all expense paid trip to Disney World for her and her kids, and Dorothy to visit her cancer stricken daughter. It gave a Blue Jays fan the thrill of a lifetime when he tossed out the first pitch at the Rogers Centre accompanied by his idol, Jose Bautista. And while the Thanking Machine was only deployed at four TD locations, at 2pm on the day the video was launched, every customer interacting with the bank, online, over the phone or physically at each of TD’s 1200 locations in Canada personally received $20 from TD employees.

The raw emotions that people feel can tell a phenomenal story through various platforms, whether it’s video, social media or human to human. More than 200 different interactions were caught on camera and edited into a four-minute video that to date has been viewed over 19 million times on YouTube – Google declared the video the number one most watched branded video in Canada in 2014. #TDThanksYou became a trending topic on Twitter and on Facebook, over 45,000 organic shares led to a 1256% increase over previously shared content. It received significant earned media pickup on outlets like CBC, CNN, NBC Nightly News, Mashable and Buzzfeed.

11.4 million consumers said the campaign changed their perception of TD for the positive (16.1 million said it reinforced already positive perceptions) at a cost of just 9 cents per person impacted. But most importantly TD showed the world that there 12 million customers aren’t just numbers, and that TD isn’t just your ordinary bank. While the numbers demonstrate the outward success of the campaign, it’s these personal interactions that illustrate the meaning.