Most engagements start with a traditional creative brief from the Client. Too often it’s a sprawling PDF stuffed with legacy slides, buried KPIs, and five different “number‑one” objectives. Helpful intent—bloated execution. Why it matters: According to our 2024 Finsights study, 75% of consumers say they’re dissatisfied with their current financial‑services provider—a clear warning that indifference …

Three concise “reasons why this works” for every idea. That’s what we come prepared with when we present thinking to our Clients—clear, focused statements that anchor the conversation around why we believe a concept works. Not three customer‑facing claims—three internal reasons why we believe the idea earns its place in the room. It’s a forcing …

Clickthrough rates aren’t meaningless. But they’re wildly overvalued. We see it all the time in financial services: Clients show us a piece of creative that performs well because it “gets clicks”—even if those clicks come from the wrong audience, lead nowhere meaningful, or fade out before anyone takes real action. It’s the illusion of effectiveness. …

At Shiny, creative reviews aren’t a solo exercise. We meet live, as a team, because strategy-driven creative work demands more than just feedback—it demands discussion. We don’t just review each other’s work. We challenge it. We ask better questions. We wordsmith together. We interrogate assumptions. We ruthlessly obsess over clarity, tone, and the ‘why’ behind …

In financial services, the appetite for bold ideas often gets filtered through layers of risk, compliance, and caution. The result? Work that’s well-executed but safe. Familiar. Expected. We’ve seen how hard it can be for even the most ambitious Clients to break free from what they’ve always done. That’s why we use a concepting framework …

Competitive research gets a bad rap in financial services. It’s often treated like a benchmarking exercise. Something you do to validate where you are—or to get permission to play catch-up. But the point of competitive research isn’t to be the best of the banks. Competitive research isn’t about catching up. It’s about seeing what’s coming. …

Most financial brands think their problem is awareness. It isn’t. It’s relevance. You can buy awareness. You can’t buy relevance. You earn it by saying the one thing that makes someone stop scrolling, stop comparing, and start thinking, “This might actually work for me.” That doesn’t come from your product truth. It comes from your …

A lot of financial marketers work from a place of constraint. They start with what the brand has done before, what compliance will allow, what last year’s budget looked like. It makes sense. But it also caps the ambition of the work before it even begins. We would advocate for the opposite. Remove all the constraints. …

Here’s the trap: you benchmark your digital experience against other banks as a best practice, right? That might tell you what your peers are doing. But it won’t tell you what your customers expect. They’re not spending all day comparing bank apps. They’re living in the worlds of brands like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube—brands that have …

In financial services, you don’t lose customers to better brands. You lose them to inertia. It’s not the competitor who wins the day. It’s the back button. It’s the half-finished form. It’s the customer who decided to think about it later and never came back. That’s the real enemy. And if you don’t name it …