Be interesting
The strongest finance brands won't win because they adopted AI before everyone else. They'll win because they combine AI's efficiency with something that's still difficult to automate: distinctive thinking.
The technology will help everyone execute. It won't stop everyone looking and sounding the same. That's still the challenge.
Whether you’re doing it with your in house team outsourcing to a big agency or running through a leaner creative studio (like mine), it’s still about the idea. Crack a good one, have a distinct personality, the sky is the limit.
AI Ads in Finance…
the good, and the gaping hole.
The good…
AI is empowering finance brand marketing. Research that once took days now takes hours. Creative testing is faster and more nuanced. Draft legals can be drawn up in seconds. Search campaigns are more sophisticated. Media buying is increasingly automated. Google Ads has spent years moving marketers towards AI-driven bidding, audience targeting and Performance Max campaigns because, in many cases, the machine is better at optimising thousands of signals than a human ever could.
AI is also accelerating content production, localisation, reporting and campaign analysis. These aren't future possibilities; they've already landed and are changing the way marketing teams operate.
In BCG's 2026 global CMO survey, 96% of marketing leaders said AI is transforming their function, and almost half reported significantly increasing investment in AI. The technology has moved well beyond experimentation and is now becoming part of everyday marketing operations.
The productivity gains are real. I use AI every day and I wouldn't want to work without it.
Where AI Plataeus
The assumption seems to be that if everyone becomes more efficient faster, cheaper and more efficient everyone wins.
As AI becomes available to every agency, every in-house team and every competitor, efficiency stops being a competitive advantage. It simply becomes the new baseline. The question shifts from how quickly can you produce marketing? to why would anyone notice it?
That's a much harder problem. Finance has never struggled to produce marketing. It has struggled to produce distinctive marketing.
Most banks, insurers and super funds already teeter on the edge of being parity. They compete on the same product features, use similar language and often rely on the same visual conventions. AI doesn't create that sameness, but it can amplify it by making it easier to produce larger volumes of competent work built from the same underlying patterns.
Let’s talk creative
Reach out with your brief, big or small, and we can get moving on growing your brand.
