Brilliant Ads FinTech: Embrace, CreditAssociates & VCX, & more.


Brilliant Ads FinTech

Embrace, CreditAssociates & VCX, & more.


Hey,

Fintech ads are their own sport. Different rules (hello compliance), different creative, different winners.

Each week: the best fintech ads running right now, and exactly what to steal from them.


THIS WEEK IN FINTECH ADS

Your oldest Facebook ad is four days old. TikTok's are 1,315.

The longest running Facebook static in our last market pull had been live four days. On TikTok, three fintech ads are still running at 1,315 days and climbing.

That is a 300x gap in how long a piece of creative survives.

Most fintech teams still budget one refresh cadence across both. One of those platforms is eating creative faster than you can make it. The other is quietly compounding the thing you made three years ago.

Only 22% of the answers AI gives about fintech point back at you.

Someone analysed 2.1 million fintech answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Grok. Roughly a fifth of citations went to brand-owned domains. The rest went to news, Wikipedia, Reddit and third parties.

When the models do quote a brand, they quote the help centre and the product documentation, not the marketing site. Perplexity's single most cited domain is Reddit.

Your compliance-reviewed support docs are now a top of funnel asset. Almost nobody is resourcing them like one.

TikTok doubled its AI video the day after the EU rules landed.

On 3 August, Symphony's maximum AI-generated video went from 15 seconds to 30, and reference uploads went from 9 to 50.

Thirty seconds is the line where AI generation stops being a hook factory and starts carrying a full product explainer. Which is exactly the format a considered purchase needs.

The EU's AI transparency obligations became binding on 2 August. One day earlier. The duty to disclose sits with the advertiser, not the tool.


Do you want us to take a look at your ads?

We manage $100M+ a year in fintech ad spend. Want us to look at yours?


Fintech Ad of the Week: AJ Bell

🧪 Principle: Make your name the picture

A wingsuit and a brass bell for a helmet, because nobody else bothers to draw their own name.


Steal This Visual: Embrace

🧪 Principle: Draw the phrase you already say

Two dachshunds end to end, because the phrase already had a picture inside it.


Steal This Answer: CreditAssociates

🧪 Principle: Put the objection in the picture

A snail strapped to a rocket answers how long it takes without ever writing the word fast.


Steal This Type: Varo

🧪 Principle: Set the product name enormous and demote everything else

CASH ADVANCE set enormous and the amounts shrunk to a footnote, because scale is the message.


AN AD WE MADE

One of ours for Revolut.

The headline gives you an order. READ THE SMALL PRINT, set as large as the frame will allow.

The small print tells you to stop taking orders. "Stop doing what others tell you. Your money. Your rules." You only get the joke by doing what the headline said.

Nothing else is in the frame. No card, no app, no rate, no offer. Two type sizes and a logo. The gag cannot be skimmed, because reading it is the entire point.



THIS WEEK FROM MULTIPLY

A client changed who they would lend to and forgot to tell the media team.

A UK consumer lender tightened its underwriting acceptance thresholds mid-flight. Their own marketing lead did not know in advance.

Here is what that looked like in the account:

  1. CPM, CTR and CPC barely moved
  2. Cost per application barely moved
  3. Approved customers on Google fell
  4. Blended CAC missed target

Every number the ad account owns looked fine. The one number it does not own moved, and the miss got written up as a media problem.

A five point shift in an approval rate moves reported CAC further than most creative tests ever will.

Put an approval rate line next to your CAC line. Without it you are handing your ad account the blame for a risk decision.


Want this run on your account?

Read by people at Revolut · Coinbase · Mastercard · Kraken · eToro

If you enjoyed this, drop me a reply with what you liked, or just send me a test-tube emoji. 🧪

​Brilliant Ads FinTech​

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