Overview

Chase faced an emerging challenge: while Millennials and Gen‑Z accounted for over 65% of new branded card accounts, the brand struggled to earn their trust. Research showed that 97% of Gen‑Z expect personalization and transparency in financial brands, yet most messaging felt corporate and impersonal.

Chase’s Financial Freedom and Freedom Rise campaign was well-produced but failed to resonate on TikTok or Instagram Reels. Their goal: make banking feel authentic, not corporate.

Approach

We were brought on to build a trusted creator education campaign that would fund high-engagement micro-series, authentically explain banking concepts, and build trust via native social content.

In just eight weeks, we delivered:

• A micro-creator network of 40 Gen‑Z creators (finance, lifestyle, student-focused)
• A branded short-series format (“Chase Takeovers”) explaining banking — credit, budgeting, loans — in under 60 seconds
• Custom email + DM guidance for creators to ensure consistent tone, transparency, and legal compliance
• An onboarding “Trust Toolkit” with topic-brief templates, emoji-based branding, and community-led explainer feedback loops

This campaign outpaced our projected Gen‑Z engagement benchmarks by 3× within three weeks of launch.

Each episode lived natively on Reels, TikTok, or Instagram Stories and pushed traffic to interactive in-app educational experiences like Chase Money Skills and live Q&A activations online.

Credit card sign‑ups from Gen‑Z increased 27%, and app downloads surged by 18%

Results

• Influencer‑led content drove a 27% lift in Gen‑Z Sapphire product applications
• The average watch-through rate hit 52% on Reels/TikTok—above industry standard (~40%)
• Transparency score (measured via post-campaign survey) rose from 68% to 84% among target segments
• Internal Chase teams opted to roll out this format into additional product categories, including Chase mortgage outreach and student banking campaigns

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