Working smarter: How FNB solved the manual lift of Search ad creation with AI Max

Clare Trafankowska heads digital media and marketing at First National Bank (FNB) in South Africa. She leads technical, creative and strategic innovation at one of the country’s largest and oldest financial institutions.

In modern financial services, customer expectations move at the speed of search. Today, consumers rarely begin their search journeys with a brand name. Instead, they search around immediate moments, needs, or pain points — whether they are looking to unlock value through loyalty programs, secure affordable data bundles, or explore long-term banking solutions.

At FNB, our brand promise is rooted in ‘help’. To deliver on this promise in moments of exploration, we must proactively connect our customers to the most relevant products and information without friction.

While our lower-funnel Search campaigns were producing solid results, maintaining them required heavy operational liftoff. Managing static keyword lists and manual ad creation across multiple product lines strained our team’s agility as intent signals evolved in real time.

With our partner agency, First Advertising, we looked to AI to shave hours off weekly campaign creation and management, while achieving up to a 9.8X increase in conversions.

Addressing the manual bottleneck of campaign management

Search campaigns for a large financial institution like FNB typically need a lot of time, effort, and energy.

“The manual setup required teams to constantly build out keyword lists, create multiple ad permutations, monitor performance signals, and make ongoing adjustments,” explained Suzanne Myburgh, sub capability lead at First Advertising.

From our perspective, this manual overhead introduced a risk: it was taking too long to serve a relevant message to Search users looking for solutions. To get ahead of this, while upholding strict brand and governance standards, we needed a solution that could automate query discovery and ad creation without losing quality or trust.

Deploying AI Max for real-time query and asset optimisation

To solve this, we integrated an AI-driven search strategy that connected broader intent matching with real-time query discovery. Performance Max handled multi-channel, lower-funnel conversions, while AI Max allowed us to enhance this performance as an extra optimisation layer, creating relevant ads tailored to underlying customer needs in seconds.

This strategy was tested across three products for South Africans looking for various solutions:

• eBucks: FNB’s rewards programme for value-seeking consumers looking to get cash back on flights, groceries, petrol, and more.
• Savings Accounts: FNB offers a variety of savings investment accounts designed for different goals, access needs, and age groups.
• FNB Connect: A telecommunications offering for FNB customers only, providing voice, text, and data plans.

Crucially, automation never meant relinquishing control. FNB gave product expertise and governance parameters, while First Advertising directed media strategy. Human oversight ensured each AI-generated asset remained accurate, responsible, and aligned with FNB’s brand tone.

The goal was never to let automation replace judgement. Instead, it was to use AI to assist human expertise, enabling us to respond to customer needs more effectively.

Reclaiming time and driving peak conversions

Combining real-time intent discovery with automated ad creation dramatically transformed both operational productivity and campaign performance:

• Conversions for Savings Accounts campaign surged by 9.8X, as AI Max captured nuanced intent patterns missed by static keywords.
• eBucks saw a 2.3X increase in conversions, while FNB Connect grew conversions by 15%.
• Click-through rates (CTR) peaked at 46% — more than double the 21% CTR recorded on non-AI Max campaigns. Overall impressions grew by 82%, and total ad clicks increased by 19%.
• The automation of keyword discovery and ad generation saved more than seven hours of manual work per campaign each week.

“The time saved allowed our teams to shift away from repetitive execution and focus on higher-value strategic analysis, customer insights, and journey optimisation,” added Myburgh.

Key learnings for marketers

• Relevance powers performance: An near-tenfold increase in conversions demonstrates that when ad creative directly reflects intent at the moment of search, customers view the interaction as helpful rather than purely promotional.
• AI assists, human expertise guides: Successful AI deployment is not about giving up control. Technology provides speed and query discovery at scale, while human governance guarantees brand alignment, compliance, and trust.
• Listen to customer signals: Capturing search intent requires moving beyond rigid, predefined keyword lists. Letting media strategies adapt in real time reveals valuable, unexpected audience demand.

Following these results, we plan to scale AI Max across our broader product and advertising roadmap. As customer intent continues to accelerate, combining real-time automation with human insight ensures that whenever South Africans search for a solution, FNB is already there to help.