Self

Challenge

Self was in their fifth year of business and about to complete their Series D funding round. Until then they had been focused on using performance marketing to promote the brand. Now they were looking for an agency partner to explode the brand and create mass awareness among the 100+ million Americans with low/no credit.

SOLUTION

We used Third3ye™ to talk to dozens of people and found our insight: everyone, no matter where they are on the economic spectrum, has a dream. And they all want help building it. The insight woke up the snoozy credit stuff by exploring the emotional benefits good credit can bring you. This focused our energy around supporting the people who need us most.

RESULTS

The “Dream Builder” integrated campaign spanned TV, OOH, digital, and social. Self saw a 35% increase in new accounts and hit 1,000,000+ active credit builders. These milestones helped Self secure an additional $50M in their Series E funding round.

Why does The Washington Post deliver news as comedy skits on TikTok? Because that’s what the community wants. If you run your existing TV work there, you will fail. So before Self could show up in a one-day takeover as the first ad in 50M users' feeds, we had to set out their TikTok strategy. With that in place, our in-house creative studio got to work creating the takeover ads and building out Self’s feed from the ground up. By takeover day, Self looked like a true TikTok native.

This is a brand campaign that extends down the funnel. So to help people understand how Self works, we worked with Katie O’Grady for a remote shoot with some of Portland’s finest talent. The result was explainer videos with more personality than you’d usually get.  

When Self hit 1,000,000 builders, we partnered with Verzuz to celebrate. This was a one-night virtual block party from Harlem with D’Angelo going head-to-head with friends. The night was full of surprises including a duet between the father of neo-soul and the showstopping up-and-coming artist H.E.R. It was 2.5 hours of community building through music.

We packed the same positivity and dream-backing spirit of the TV into our audio ads. They helped expand on how Self is a member of every builder’s Dream Building team.

For OOH we helped Self bring their vision to subway stations with takeovers of positivity — transforming dull, grey stations into bright and bold spaces that buzz with the potential and knowledge of a new way to take your financial future into your own hands. Like the TV and the radio, these posters were reflections of the biggest goals Self customers are building for.

We also helped Self partner with Wrapify to help rideshare drivers close the “getting by” gap. They’re both companies on a mission to help fix the financial potholes in the U.S. We had drivers and their cars repping Self across the country to put some extra cash in their pockets. And for the riders, we created Dream Building swag kits to help build dreams one ride at a time.