Ring, ring, cha-ching! What's working in finance and telco advertising

Historically, both finance and telco brands have some struggles when it comes to creating effective advertising. For the finance category for example, this is particularly true if they don’t have a brand character or mascot to rely on (and let’s be honest: finance typically isn’t thrilling subject matter). While telco ads do a good job communicating product features and generating immediate purchase interest, they tend to be weaker at building long-term brand memories. 

But is that just history? Or have things changed over time? We set to find out in this year’s State of Creative Effectiveness report. 

Read on for a look into what’s working (and what’s not) in the finance and telco category today, based on what we discovered from our study of effectiveness data from over 4,000 US ads, as well as some examples of their industry advertising done right.

But first, let’s go over where the data comes from. 

Developed in partnership with some of the world’s biggest consumer brands, Zappi’s Amplify Ad System combines the best thinking in advertising research to give a well-rounded and complete picture of creative effectiveness: 

• In-context exposure: Measures real media behavior, ad skipping, brand recall and purchase impact.

• Emojis: Captures emotional response in an intuitive and globally relevant and representative way.

• Forced exposure: Assesses key ad KPIs, social risk and direct consumer feedback.

With this approach, we get a full picture of creative effectiveness. We can also understand an individual piece of creative’s strengths and weaknesses to help diagnose issues and optimize it so it performs to its fullest potential.

Looking across the data from over 4,000 US ads collected with this methodology, we focused on the averages for each metric for each category — or in this case, the finance and telco categories. 

Keep in mind that these are the averages of the category, which means that many of the individual ads in those categories are stronger than the average and many are weaker than the average. 

This helps us understand the general strengths and weaknesses of the whole category, not just individual brands within the category. This data can provide useful benchmarks for your individual ads and give a picture of how hard your advertising may need to work to overcome any common challenges for advertising within that category. 

Now that we’ve covered our approach, let’s get into our findings.

We found that financial services ads score lower than the average in nearly all metrics, but most notably distinctiveness, relevance and emotion.

This is understandable, as it’s harder (but still possible!) to advertise an intangible product or service compared to a tangible one you can show off. And financial services are generally a more stressful subject people don’t always want to engage with. 

One area that it nearly achieves parity with the average is in brand recall. Most US insurance brands feature “brand characters” in their advertising that have become household names thanks to many years of investment. Insurance may seem a dull topic at first glance, but insurance brands have found engaging ways to highlight why insurance is a good idea, often using these brand characters along with humor — which is why the category outperforms the US in laughter (and is the top category for laughter in our analysis!).

The category’s overall brand recall score is dragged down by banking, which is much weaker in this area compared to insurance.

💡 Zappi advice: Investing in DBAs is critical, especially for banking brands, to make future advertising more effective. Money is a sensitive topic for many consumers, so it’s essential to research your ads during the creative process to ensure you’ve landed on something distinctive that’s still relevant and connects emotionally with the audience, while still meeting all regulatory requirements. 

Appealing to younger crowds

Vayner Media, our partner on this year’s report, also added that while it can be tougher to market an intangible product like financial services, there’s no reason financial services brands can’t be relevant to younger audiences on social media. 

“We helped Visa convert a legacy Olympics sponsorship into a relevant story for Gen Z on social — since Gen Z viewership of the Olympic Games itself was at an all-time low.”

- Vayner Media

By leveraging Visa team athlete stories and trending event conversations, Vayner Media created and iterated on 240 assets for 10+ markets across instagram and TikTok during the Olympics, resulting in benchmark-breaking social content performance and community engagement (including 227 million impressions and nearly 40K likes on comments) that created a new playbook for future Visa sponsorship engagements — proving that categories like finance can still soar with a younger audience on social channels when done right.

Telco advertising still performs less well, overall, than other categories — which again is understandable for a category selling intangible services. Distinctiveness, brand recall, relevance and overall emotion are all below the US average.

However, purchase uplift is slightly above the US average, which means that, on average, telco ads do a decent job of making more people more likely to consider the brand as a result of seeing the ad.

The category also slightly overperforms the US average for laughter, which means they rely on humor a bit more than average.

💡 Zappi advice: Tap into the strong role your brand plays in consumers’ lives. This can help your ads be seen as more relevant and leave people feeling more love toward your ads and your brands. Once people's emotions are captured, make sure your specific brand benefits by using DBAs, establishing continuity in your brand platform and giving the brand a role in the story.

Here’s a few examples of brands who did a great job at advertising within each of these categories: 

PayPal’s “PayPal Everywhere”

PayPal’s “PayPal Everywhere” ad is a wonderful example of a finance ad that is highly distinctive, enjoyable and emotionally engaging. 

While our findings show that financial services ads tend to struggle to connect well with people compared to other categories, this ad achieved a strong Brand Impact and average potential Sales Impact (even when compared to all US ads!) which demonstrates its overall strength in making the topic more interesting and relatable — and how could they not with a character like Will Ferrell?

And while Will Ferrell isn’t a long-term DBA such as the likes of LiMu’s Emu or Geico’s Gecko, through a series of ads in PayPal’s largest campaign, he has become an instantly recognizable character in the series — creating a short term character for the brand that consumers instantly recognize! 

Mint Mobile’s “55+ Plan”

Mint Mobile’s “55+ Plan” ad is chock-full of DBAs — from their mint green background, to their strategically placed logo and even Ryan Reynolds, once again starring as the protagonist in their ad.

What makes this such a great example is that telco ads tend to struggle with branding, leaving audiences less likely to remember who the ad was for on top of having a general lack of established DBAs in the category. But this is not the case for Mint Mobile! 

Their focus on DBAs highly differentiates them in their category and resulted in 79% of viewers being able to correctly identify who the ad was for — a true lesson in great DBA usage!

There’s many things that brands in the finance and telco industries can learn from consumers about what’s working in their advertising and what’s not. 

For more on how to create ads that win with consumers, download our report for a deeper dive into our findings, including: 

• How creative effectiveness varies among different ages and genders 

• The impact of various advertising characteristics on effectiveness, like the use of celebrities, music, AI, etc.

• Strengths and weaknesses of different categories including CPG food, QSR, alcoholic beverages, financial services, telecommunications and more

• Helpful tips and examples to help you develop your most effective creative — including guidance from our partners at Vayner Media, an integrated strategy, creative and media agency