10 Great Financial Advertising Examples

Most financial ads fall flat and are easily forgettable because the message feels forced, the copy lacks clarity, or the visuals feel recycled. 

On top of that, marketers face compliance rules, strict timelines, and audiences who are bored, scroll fast, and trust almost nothing they see.

So I've put together 10 examples of financial advertising campaigns that stand out for me. 

Some of these are from companies that ran campaigns on Blockchain-Ads, including brands like Invesco, while others are campaigns we sourced from across the internet like Square, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs.

This isn't a ranking, and we don't know the intent behind every creative decision. These are simply strong examples that, in my view, represent effective financial advertising worth paying attention to.

2025 – PayPal: "The Great PayPal Checkout" (Will Ferrell Sweepstakes)

Let's start with brute force. PayPal dropped $10 million on a sweepstakes in 2025, proving that sometimes the best strategy is simply outspending everyone else. 

Will Ferrell fronted the campaign across YouTube, streaming TV, and social platforms, doing his usual comedy routine about PayPal's checkout and Buy Now Pay Later services. But Ferrell wasn't the story; the money was.

Here's what they did: 100,000 purchases covered, up to $100 each. Run it for 100 days, pick 1,000 winners daily. The math is elementary—pay people to use your service and hope the lifetime value exceeds the upfront cost. 

Some investors weren’t happy with the spend, but PayPal got what they paid for: massive reach and a reminder that they're still the default payment option, even as newer players crowd the space.

The campaign worked because PayPal understood their position. They don't need awareness; they are already past that. What they need is activation. Sometimes that means clever creative. Sometimes it means writing checks.

2025 - TD Bank: Fractional Window Shopping

While PayPal threw money at the problem, TD Bank got clever with constraints. Their challenge: promote fractional shares without using trademarked logos of the companies people actually want to invest in. Apple, Nike, Tesla—all off limits legally.

So, they worked with a popular finance marketing agency in Canada called Ogilvy who came up with a brilliant solution. They built custom frames with laser-cut windows and positioned them on city streets at precise angles. 

Look through the frame, and you'd see a perfect fraction of a real corporate logo on a nearby building. The Nike swoosh. The Apple bite. Technically, TD Bank never used these logos… they just showed you where to look.

These installations weren't really for pedestrians. They were content engines, built to be photographed and shared online. Every post explained fractional investing better than any compliance-approved copy could. 

You're literally looking at a piece of something valuable through a window. The concept clicked immediately.

The campaign generated a 78% lift in brand perception among exposed audiences. More importantly, it proved that legal restrictions can become creative advantages.

2025 – Venmo: "What's Your Venmo?" Campaign

From physical installations, we move to pure cultural engineering. Venmo's 2025 campaign with 72andSunny revolved around one phrase: "What's your Venmo?"

The ads, scattered across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, showed everyday money moments like splitting dinner, paying a dog walker, chipping in for gas. 

Each scenario ended the same way, with someone asking for a Venmo handle. No product demos or feature lists. Just the repeated suggestion that this is how money moves now.

The genius was in the verb creation. Google did it. Uber did it. Now Venmo has people saying "just Venmo me" without thinking twice. The campaign made peer-to-peer payments seem like they were already part of your life. That assumption, repeated enough times with the right soundtrack and casting, became reality for their target audience.

2024 - Invesco ETF Lead Generation Campaign

Invesco took a different route entirely: surgical precision over mass appeal. Their 60-day campaign on Blockchain-Ads ignored brand building completely, focusing instead on users already researching tokenized assets, ETFs, and inflation hedging.

The numbers tell the story: 

2,100 high-value leads at $24 per acquisition, generating $315,000 in total value for a 4.8x return. All thanks to behavioral targeting that caught investors at the exact moment they were looking for solutions.

The messaging avoided both jargon and dumbing-down—a rare balance in financial advertising. They spoke to investors like investors, not consumers who need hand-holding. 

Multiple touchpoints ensured that researchers who didn't convert immediately got another chance without feeling stalked.

2024 – Revolut: "Simplify Your Finances" (Munya Musical on TikTok)

Revolut faced the classic fintech challenge: making features like "24/7 fraud monitoring" and "great FX rates" interesting to people who'd rather watch TikTok than read about banking. Their solution was to literally turn it into entertainment.

UK comedian Munya Chawawa performed a mini-musical about Revolut's features. Yes, a musical about foreign exchange rates. The format sounds absurd until you realize it worked. The videos spread organically across TikTok and YouTube because they were genuinely entertaining, not just "entertaining for a bank ad."

The campaign demonstrated a truth most financial brands ignore: if you're interrupting someone's entertainment, you better be entertaining.

2024 - HSBC: Make Your Money Work Harder

HSBC Canada faced a different problem in late 2023: every bank was saying the exact same thing. "Make your money work harder" had become the industry's most overused phrase, appearing in every high-yield savings campaign from every major bank.

Rather than find new words, HSBC literalized the metaphor. They created a "Money" character—an actual personification of currency—shown diligently working various jobs for Canadians. Your money as a construction worker. Your money pulling overtime. Your money never taking breaks.

The campaign ran everywhere from October to December 2023

• programmatic banners
• social media
• Radio
• Print
• OOH
• SEM

It won multiple IAC Awards in 2024, not for originality of message but for making a tired phrase memorable again.

2023 – Nuvei: "Aboot Payments" (Ryan Reynolds for B2B Fintech)

B2B fintech advertising typically ranges from boring to invisible. Nuvei, a Canadian payments processor, decided to break that pattern by deploying their investor Ryan Reynolds in a series of deliberately ridiculous videos.

Reynolds leaned into his Canadian-ness, overemphasizing "aboot" while explaining global payment solutions. The dry delivery and self-aware humor turned what should have been a forgettable B2B pitch into content people actually shared on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The campaign proved that B2B buyers are still humans who appreciate not being bored to death. Reynolds managed to communicate Nuvei's value prop—fast, flexible payments—while acknowledging that payments infrastructure isn't inherently thrilling. The honesty was refreshing. The celebrity factor got attention, but the self-deprecating tone kept it.

2023 – SoFi: "Face of Finance" (AI Bias Awareness)

SoFi discovered something worth talking about in 2023: when you ask AI to generate images of "people good with money," women appear about 2% of the time. Instead of just tweeting about it, they built a campaign around fixing it.

The execution was multi-layered. First, reveal the bias through online videos on YouTube and LinkedIn. Then, create a solution: a pop-up photo booth in NYC where women could literally become the "face of finance." 

Add a social contest with Taylor Swift tickets as stakes (at SoFi Stadium, naturally), and you've got user-generated content that makes your point better than any ad could.

The campaign worked because it identified a real problem that aligned with SoFi's business interests and leveraged it. More women in finance means more potential SoFi customers. 

The AI angle made it current, the Swift tickets made it shareable, and the underlying message made it matter. Finance advertising rarely manages to be culturally relevant. This was.

2022 – Coinbase: Bouncing QR Code Super Bowl Ad

We end with the ad that broke the internet—literally. Coinbase's 2022 Super Bowl spot was 60 seconds of a QR code bouncing around the screen like an old DVD screensaver. No music. No voiceover. No explanation.

The curiosity gap was unbearable. Millions scanned it simultaneously, crashing Coinbase's app. The code led to $15 in free Bitcoin and entry into a $3 million giveaway—solid incentives, but the real victory was the engagement rate. In an era of second-screen distraction, Coinbase got viewers to actively participate with their ad.

AdAge and Adweek both ranked it #1 among Super Bowl ads that year. The minimalism was radical for a $14 million media buy, but it worked because it understood the medium perfectly. Super Bowl ads are about commanding attention. Coinbase did it by refusing to compete on the usual terms—no celebrities, no production value, no story. Just a square that bounced.

2022 - Starling Bank: Set Your Business Free

Starling Bank closed out 2022 with visual poetry. Their "Set Your Business Free" campaign showed small business owners—dog groomers, painters, entrepreneurs—watching their tools gently levitate after receiving a Starling app notification.

The metaphor was immediate: business banking that removes weight rather than adding it. No monthly fees explained through floating invoices. No administrative burden shown through ascending laptops. Wonderhood Studios created something that felt more like magical realism than financial advertising.

The Pattern

These ten financial ad campaigns succeeded through different strategies—brute force spending (PayPal), creative constraints (TD Bank), cultural engineering (Venmo), surgical targeting (Invesco), entertainment value (Revolut), literal visualization (HSBC), celebrity irreverence (Nuvei), purpose alignment (SoFi), radical minimalism (Coinbase), and visual poetry (Starling).

But they share one trait: they all refused to look like financial advertising. The successful campaigns of 2024-2025 didn't try to make finance interesting—they found ways to be interesting while happening to be about finance. 

That distinction, more than any creative technique or media strategy, separates memorable financial advertising from the forgettable majority.

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