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Brea Thibodeau partners with media and creator agencies, and platform experts to build customer insight‑led creative that drives real business results for financial services company Experian.
We’re proud to be the U.K.’s biggest credit score provider. But we didn’t get there by lacking in ambition. Which is why, last year, we decided to focus on demographics that our data was telling us didn’t know as much about us as they should. Namely, 18- to 34-year-olds.
This audience represents the future of our business, and we, in turn, could really help them out at a crucial point in their financial education journey. Yet our marketing wasn’t drawing their eyes — and attention — as much as we wanted.
We realised that if we wanted to change the data, we had to meet them where they already were: YouTube. This meant we had to stop acting like a traditional advertiser and start acting like a creator. After all, those are the people they resonate with most.
Engaging tomorrow’s customers
Our internal research revealed two core challenges: awareness and consideration. Younger consumers weren’t choosing competitors; they just weren’t thinking about credit scores at all, as they weren’t at the stage of life that they needed to. Or, in their terms, ‘relationship status: ‘It’s not you, it’s me’.’
After all, most people only start thinking about their credit score when they need it for a loan or mortgage, but by then, it can be too late to make meaningful improvements. With this in mind, we felt we had an important education job to do. But — especially with this age group in mind — we were all too aware that a topic like financial health can feel dry and uninteresting.
To break through to an audience that values transparency, we had to deliver our message in a way that felt:
- Authentic: Eschewing the corporate ‘suit and tie’ vibe.
- Proactive: Positioning credit health as a tool for freedom, not a chore.
- Native: Appearing in the environments where these younger audiences already spend their time.
A strategic pivot from broadcaster to collaborator
We knew YouTube was the right platform to deliver the incremental reach our existing plans were missing. But simply running ads wasn’t enough. To build genuine trust and make a complex topic relatable, we decided to harness the power of creators — the people this audience already knew, trusted, and actively chose to watch.
This was a significant shift for us as a financial services company. We partnered with the creator agency Whalar to identify creators who could bring our message to life. We weren’t necessarily looking for finance experts. Instead, we focused on personalities like Nella Rose, Chloe Burrows, and Jack Remmington, who had a real connection with their communities.
The key was finding creators who could make their audience feel something, because if they could do that for clothing or homewares, they could make credit scores feel relevant and important.
Building a platform-first campaign
Authenticity was our guiding principle. Instead of handing creators a rigid corporate script, we treated them as true creative partners. We gave them the same brief and strategy but allowed them to execute it in their own voice.
For example, Nella Rose had a vision of herself as a “boss woman” in a suit for her ad. That energy and confidence made the final cut feel like her content, not our ad. When creators believe in the message and feel comfortable in how they deliver it, the result is far more persuasive.
To ensure the technical execution matched the creative energy, we worked closely with Google’s Creative Works UKI team. Their expertise was essential in ensuring our content captured attention immediately by following YouTube’s best practices:
- Immediate hook: Capturing attention within the first 5 seconds.
- Modular assets: We developed a full ecosystem of 6-, 10-, 15-, 30-, and 60-second cuts.
- Balanced funnel: Using short-form ads for reach and long-form content for deeper financial education.
Reversing the trend: A significant uplift in awareness and consideration
By looking at our media plan holistically, we were able to drive significant increases in performance. The results from our four-way measurement approach — via Brand Lift, Kantar, XMR, and YouGov — gave us a really clear, holistic picture of the campaign’s success.
This showed a 10-percentage-point lift in brand awareness for Experian among 18- to 34-year-olds. A separate Kantar study was even more positive, showing a 19-percentage-point increase in awareness for our brand amidst this target group.
The campaign also proved to be an efficient way to expand our reach, with data from Brand Report showing that YouTube provided 81% incremental reach compared to our TV activity for this audience.
From ‘the credit people’ to ‘the partners’
One of the biggest surprises for me was the immediate impact this shift in strategy had on intent. While our primary goal was a long-term play on awareness, we saw a significant search uplift from people who had seen the ads. They weren’t just becoming aware of Experian; they were actively curious and seeking us out.
The key lesson from this journey was the power of true collaboration. By bringing together our brand knowledge with the creator-first expertise of agency Whalar and the platform insights of Google, we started a conversation with a new generation.
We’ve learned that when you trust creators and invest in the platforms where your audience thrives, you can turn a challenging trend into a story of growth.
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