SoFi Media Case Study
SoFi is not a bank. It’s a financial start-up, leading the way in merit-based lending.
SoFi was founded by a group of Stanford Business School graduates intent on disrupting traditional financial services.
SoFi’s goal was simple but ambitious: it wanted to become consumer’s first choice -- ahead of big, well-known banks with billions of ad spend -- for loans and refinancing. But that wasn’t going to come easy. SoFi was an unknown brand with a hard-to-reach target audience that finds the industry untrustworthy.
We went big, starting with the theme, “Don’t Bank. SoFi.”
One of our first splashes was on advertising’s biggest stage, the Super Bowl, bringing to the masses the message that banks are a thing of the past. We also used a promoted trend on Twitter, took over YouTube’s mobile masthead, showed our spot in movie theaters before “The Big Short,” took over the lobbies and elevators of SoFi’s banking competitors, bought time on some of the biggest podcasts, used influencers on Medium to write pieces on the future of money, and created an OOH stunt projecting hard-hitting industry truths on a massive deserted bank.
SoFi may have been relatively unknown before the campaign launch, but the brand became highly visible, with awareness going to 10% post campaign.