Financial Services Advertising Is Broken at the Top of the Funnel

Financial services advertising has a structural problem that most brands in the sector quietly know about but rarely address directly. The industry spends heavily on performance channels, optimises obsessively for conversion, and then wonders why growth plateaus. The answer is usually not in the bottom of the funnel. It is in the fact that not enough new people are being reached at the top of it.

Done well, financial services advertising builds trust with people who are not yet in the market, so that when they are ready, the brand is already part of the consideration set. That is a different job to capturing intent. And most financial brands are not doing it.

Why Financial Services Advertising Gets Stuck in Performance Mode

Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel performance channels. It made sense at the time. The data was clean, the attribution looked good, and the numbers reported well in client meetings. What I eventually understood is that much of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen regardless. Someone searching for “best cash ISA” has already done most of their decision-making before they hit your paid search ad. You are not persuading them. You are just present at the moment they act.

That is not a bad place to be. But it is not growth. Growth requires reaching people who are not yet looking, building enough familiarity and trust that when they do start looking, your brand is already in the frame. Financial services brands that rely almost entirely on performance channels are, in effect, fishing in a pond that someone else stocked. They are capturing demand that the market created, not demand they built themselves.

This matters more in financial services than in almost any other sector, because the purchase cycle is long and the switching cost is high. A person who opens a current account at 22 may stay with that bank for decades. The brand that reaches them before they are in the market, and earns a degree of trust before any transaction has taken place, has an enormous structural advantage. That advantage is built through advertising that most financial services brands are not running.

What Makes Financial Services Advertising Genuinely Difficult

I want to be fair to the sector, because the constraints are real. Financial services advertising operates under regulatory frameworks that do not apply to most other categories. In the UK, the FCA requires financial promotions to be fair, clear and not misleading. In the US, the SEC, FINRA and state-level regulators all have something to say about what you can and cannot claim. Compliance review adds time, limits creative flexibility, and creates a genuine tension between what the legal team will approve and what the creative team wants to make.

Those constraints explain some of the conservatism in financial services advertising. They do not explain all of it. A lot of what passes for caution in this sector is actually just a lack of creative ambition dressed up as compliance. I have sat in enough briefings with financial services clients to know that the instinct to default to product features, small print and generic imagery often comes from a culture of risk aversion, not from a genuine regulatory requirement. The regulation says you cannot mislead. It does not say you have to be boring.

Brands like Monzo, Starling and, going back further, First Direct, proved that financial services advertising can be distinctive, emotionally resonant and compliant at the same time. The barrier is not the regulator. It is the internal culture that treats advertising as a liability to be managed rather than an asset to be built.

If you are thinking about how financial services advertising fits into a broader growth strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the structural decisions that sit above channel and creative, including how to sequence brand and performance investment across a product launch or market entry.

The Trust Problem Is Not What Most Brands Think It Is

Every financial services brand will tell you that trust is central to their proposition. Most of them are thinking about trust in the wrong way. They treat it as something that is earned after the customer relationship begins, through good service, transparent fees and reliable products. That is customer retention thinking, not acquisition thinking.

Trust in the context of advertising is about familiarity and perceived stability before any relationship exists. It is the feeling a person has when they see your brand and think, without necessarily being able to articulate why, that you seem solid and credible. That feeling is built through consistent, long-term brand presence. It is not built through a six-week performance campaign timed to coincide with the ISA season.

I think about this in terms of a retail analogy I have used in client presentations for years. Someone who walks into a clothes shop and tries something on is dramatically more likely to buy than someone who just browses the rail. The act of engagement, of physically connecting with the product, changes the probability of purchase. Advertising works the same way. A person who has seen your brand consistently over time, who has some emotional familiarity with it, is far more likely to convert when they enter the market than someone encountering you for the first time at the point of purchase. Performance channels tend to find the people who already tried something on. Brand advertising is what gets people into the fitting room in the first place.

The challenge is that this kind of brand investment is harder to measure and slower to show results. Forrester’s research on go-to-market struggles in regulated categories highlights a pattern that financial services will recognise: organisations that are under pressure to demonstrate short-term ROI systematically underinvest in the brand-building activity that drives long-term growth. The measurement framework punishes the right behaviour.

Audience Strategy in Financial Services: The Targeting Trap

One of the most consistent errors I have seen in financial services advertising is audience targeting that is too narrow and too focused on people who are already close to a purchase decision. This is understandable from a short-term efficiency perspective. If you are running a campaign for a mortgage product and you target people who have recently searched for mortgage-related terms, your conversion rate will look good. Your cost per acquisition will look manageable. Your CFO will be satisfied.

What that approach misses is the much larger population of people who will be in the market for a mortgage in the next two to five years and who are not yet searching for anything. Those people are forming impressions of financial brands right now, through advertising they see while they are doing other things. The brand that earns a positive impression with them today, before they are in the market, has a significant advantage when they eventually start their search. Targeting them now is not inefficient. It is an investment in future conversion.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation and go-to-market strategy makes a similar point about the danger of over-optimising for existing demand signals at the expense of demand creation. The brands that sustain growth over time are those that continuously expand their addressable audience, not those that become increasingly efficient at converting the same narrow pool of high-intent prospects.

In practical terms, this means financial services advertisers need to think about their audience strategy in at least two distinct layers. The first is the in-market audience: people who are actively considering a product in the category. These people should be captured efficiently through performance channels. The second is the future-market audience: people who match the demographic and behavioural profile of likely future customers but who are not yet in the market. These people need brand advertising, not direct response. The media mix, the creative approach and the measurement framework should be different for each layer.

Creative Strategy: Where Financial Services Advertising Consistently Underperforms

I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically about advertising effectiveness rather than creative craft. One of the things that becomes clear when you are reviewing submissions across categories is how rarely financial services entries make a strong case for creative as a driver of business outcomes. The entries tend to be heavy on media investment and light on creative distinction. The implicit assumption is that scale substitutes for distinctiveness. It rarely does.

Effective financial services advertising tends to share a few characteristics. It is emotionally relevant without being manipulative. It connects the product to a real moment in a person’s life, whether that is buying a first home, starting a business, or planning for retirement, without overpromising what the product will deliver. It uses a consistent visual and tonal identity that builds recognition over time. And it treats the audience as intelligent adults who can handle nuance, rather than defaulting to either fear-based messaging or aspirational fantasy.

The brands that do this well tend to be the ones where marketing has genuine influence over the product and the customer experience, not just the communications. That is a structural point as much as a creative one. If the advertising promises simplicity but the onboarding process is a nightmare, no amount of creative quality will fix the underlying problem. The advertising and the product have to be consistent, and in financial services, where the product is often complex and the customer experience is long, that alignment is genuinely difficult to achieve.

Understanding why go-to-market execution feels harder than it used to is worth examining separately. Vidyard’s analysis of GTM complexity touches on something financial services brands will recognise: the proliferation of channels and the fragmentation of attention have made it harder to build the kind of sustained brand presence that used to be achievable through a smaller number of media investments. That is a real challenge, but it is also an opportunity for brands willing to think carefully about where their audience actually spends time.

Channel Mix: The Case for Rethinking Where Financial Services Brands Show Up

The default channel mix for financial services advertising has been remarkably stable for a long time: TV for brand, paid search for performance, some display and social for the middle. That mix is not wrong, but it is increasingly incomplete, and it tends to reflect the preferences of the media planning community rather than a genuine analysis of where target audiences are spending their attention.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, one of the things that changed my thinking about channel strategy was watching how often clients arrived with a pre-formed view of where they wanted to advertise, based on where they had always advertised, rather than where their customers actually were. The channel mix was inherited, not chosen. Financial services brands are particularly prone to this because the category has historically been dominated by a small number of large incumbents with established media relationships and established ways of doing things.

The more interesting question now is how financial services brands can build genuine reach and trust with audiences who are consuming content in ways that traditional financial advertising has not historically addressed. Podcast advertising, for example, has unusually high trust metrics in financial categories because the host relationship transfers credibility to the brand. Creator partnerships, done carefully, can reach younger audiences with a degree of authenticity that a standard display campaign cannot match. Later’s work on creator-led go-to-market campaigns outlines how brands are using creator content to drive both awareness and conversion in ways that feel less transactional than traditional advertising formats.

None of this means abandoning the channels that work. Paid search in financial services remains one of the highest-intent environments in advertising. The point is that a channel mix which stops at paid search and TV is leaving significant reach and trust-building opportunity on the table, particularly with younger audiences who will be the most valuable customers over the next two decades.

Measurement: The Framework That Rewards the Wrong Things

The measurement problem in financial services advertising is not unique to the sector, but it is particularly acute here because the purchase cycle is so long and the value of a customer over time is so high. A measurement framework that focuses on cost per acquisition in the first 30 days will systematically undervalue brand advertising that influences decisions made 18 months later. It will also systematically overvalue performance channels that appear to drive conversion but are actually just present at the moment a decision that was made elsewhere gets executed.

BCG’s research on go-to-market strategy and commercial performance makes the point that the most commercially sophisticated organisations measure the full value of a customer relationship, not just the initial transaction. In financial services, where the lifetime value of a customer can be substantial and where the cost of acquiring a new customer is high, measuring advertising purely on short-term conversion metrics is a way of making yourself feel efficient while actually limiting your growth.

A more honest measurement approach would include brand tracking data alongside performance metrics, would attempt to model the contribution of brand advertising to future conversion rates, and would set different time horizons for evaluating different types of investment. That is harder to do and harder to present to a board that wants clean numbers. But the alternative, optimising exclusively for what is easy to measure, produces a distorted picture of what is actually driving growth and leads to systematic underinvestment in the activities that matter most over the long term.

There is more on the structural decisions that sit behind channel and measurement choices across the Growth Strategy hub, including how to build a go-to-market approach that accounts for both short-term performance and long-term brand equity.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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