Finance

While every industry deals with change, few have been disrupted as much as banking and finance.

Technology and apps have supplanted human interaction and enabled new behavior, leaving the category commoditized and largely transactional.

And while traditional banks are getting their lunch eaten by fintechs, they frantically focus on deposit accounts with commodity offers like free checking. Really? If the best you can do is a price-of-entry offer, then you need us.

Top-down, bottom-up approach in a world of banks and financial institutions.

We’ve done more than our share of retail campaigns for checking, savings, CDs and small business loans. But we’ve also done work that separated those banks from the pack with campaigns built around ownable ideas:

Dime. A bank you can believe in.

A rebrand for New York’s largest community bank that leveraged its original mission to serve the immigrant community of Brooklyn and the neighboring boroughs, by helping the small businesses that are the lifeblood of those community.

Alliant. You got Money Mojo!

A rebrand for the country’s largest credit union that focused on the psychographic of its target audience who relentlessly work the market to snag the best rates and offers available — savvy folk who appreciate the quarter of a basis point on an auto loan or savings account.

BB&T. There's opportunity here.

A rebrand for the Mid-Atlantic bank who became the 9th largest in the country through acquisition. With the acquisition came a variety of work cultures that needed to recenter on the bank’s original ethos of finding the best outcomes in every financial situation.

Our experience in the financial category goes beyond banks.

In addition to working on Dean Witter and Salomon Smith Barney, we’ve helped Investment Advisors like Chevy Chase Trust stand out with the curious positioning that “There are two ways to invest. This is the other way.”

We’ve also worked with American Express Corporate, Chase Credit Cards and the launch of Bank One, which included helping them pioneer the category of cobranded credit cards like Starbucks, Sony and Disney.

We helped MasterCard successfully launch Maestro, the world’s first debit system.

And we created the first consumer campaign for John Nuveen, which helped attract a new generation of investors with the insight: “It’s not what you earn. It’s what you keep.”

Be bigger than a bank.

It’s painful to see banks and fintechs compete for share of wallet when there’s a bigger issue that could be addresses. Much bigger. Two thirds of American households are unable to come up with $500 in an emergency. That’s because the majority of people are living paycheck to paycheck or on credit. Or both. This household insolvency has become a silent crisis that is being largely ignored as financial brands compete for higher-margin, lower-risk segments of the market.

But we wonder if there isn’t a viable business model built around a lower-margin population that dwarfs everything else in size? Isn’t there a way to leverage automation and the power of AI to help people minimize debt and build wealth?

We believe there is. And would love to partner with a company to believes the same.

A conversation doesn't cost anything.

We’d love to chat with you, show you the opportunity your brand has. We won’t even charge you for the conversation.

Services Include:

Brand Strategy
Messaging, Positioning
Creative Concepts
Video Production
Website Design, Build, Launch