Banks Never Really Needed Great Marketing... Until They Did

Banks own some of the most recognizable names on the planet, yet their marketing still looks interchangeable—cue the steady parade of smiling retirees and stately columns. For decades, that sameness cost almost nothing, since a century-old name and a marble lobby handled most of the persuading. Younger customers increasingly want proof that a bank understands their lives, while AI is making the generic Finance 101 content banks have relied on for years easier to produce and easier to ignore. That leaves financial brands learning to compete for attention the way retailers, automakers, and snack brands have for decades.

Geoffrey Director is EVP of Strategy at Manifest, a content-led marketing agency that specializes in categories with long, complicated customer journeys. Financial services is one of those. Director spent the first half of his career as a brand planner at New York agencies including Publicis and DDB, where he was the strategist leadership sent into difficult situations across wildly different categories. He joined Manifest 11 years ago to build out its strategy practice, later taking on data as well, and he is now writing a multi-part series on marketing in the financial sector. He believes finance, long treated as a backwater by Madison Avenue, is about to become one of the most demanding marketing categories in the business.

"They're flush with money by the nature of being financial companies. They've never had to rely on marketing, and that's about to change. For the first time, marketers in this sector are going to be in the limelight. I don't know if they're ready for it, but I'm ready to help them," Director says. He blames the formula on a sector that defaults to tactical thinking and on agencies that rarely send their A-teams to finance accounts.

The monument stopped doing the talking

"The axis of competition was all about permanence and authority, being the monument on the hill, and following patterns only reinforced their entrenched nature as the all-knowing force of finance. That's not the recipe for trust anymore. Millennials and everyone younger grew up watching these brands cause global financial crises, and their definition of trust has always been authenticity. You have to be on social media showing you understand the world and not just flexing the size of your assets under management," Director says.

Permanence still counts, but banks named after towers and bridges now also have to show they understand their customers' lives. The skepticism runs deep enough that among Gen Z adults who don't invest, nearly 20% point to distrust of financial institutions as the reason.

Director also cautions against overcorrecting by treating younger customers as a foreign species reachable only through channels older marketers can't decode. "The numbers show that younger generations, the next wave of investors, are in some ways more practical and rational than their parents. They're quite findable in the usual places, they want practical advice, and they'll give you their attention if you prove to be solid, reliable and, yes, relatable."

AI made the old playbook cheap

For years, content was how old institutions reached new customers, with a steady stream of explainer articles ranking in search. and nudging a small share of readers toward an account. AI has scrambled that equation, making the same Finance 101 material cheap to generate while giving customers a way to bypass the search results entirely, with four in ten Americans recently turning to AI to help manage their finances.

"People are defaulting to the lowest common denominator application of AI, which is simply to do the same things faster and more cheaply. They're systematizing the same assembly line of production they always have, which is a tremendous miss. AI is smart enough to filter out AI-created junk content. So we're mass-producing the exact thing that AI is now making less relevant," Director says. For banks, the competition for a basic money question now includes the chatbot itself, and younger customers lean on it most heavily, with Gen Z adoption of AI for financial management reaching 68% globally.

Director wants banks to start by figuring out what their name already means to people. "I don't think the opportunity is quantity. The name of the game now is authority, which is understanding the brand equity you have, what you should be talking about, and how to demonstrate it in a really proprietary and meaningful way. I couldn't name a finance brand that's quite doing this in a brilliant way yet. So far I'm observing the same pattern of using AI to churn out the usual."

Other financial brands have already found a version of that model. Fintechs like Ramp and Carta have built proprietary authority by publishing their own data indexes and becoming the source reporters cite when they cover spending and startup trends.

Boring works when a bank owns it

The examples Director admires most skip the reinvention entirely, owning up to what a bank is, and then finding trusted places to say it out loud. PNC's Brilliantly Boring platform turns steadiness into the selling point, and later executions poke fun at get-rich-quick fads by personifying risky investments as ridiculous characters. "They're not turning their hat around backwards and saying, hey, why don't you join a really cool bank. They're just like, all right, we are a bank. We both know that we're boring. There's an advantage to this," Director says.

The campaign keeps the bank's core proposition intact and makes its own lack of flash part of the joke, giving a brand that has been around since 1865 room to be funny about exactly what it is.

Media partners lend banks trust they're still earning

The most telling find came during a competitive audit for Commerce Bank, a mid-sized regional commercial and consumer bank, when Director's team dug into JPMorgan and turned up an entire content hub on payments built with WIRED Consulting, an editorial arm Director was surprised to learn existed. Payments Unbound now runs as a full digital magazine, which puts one of the world's biggest banks among the brands becoming their own publishers. "Some of the smart brands can see that paradigm is ending. They need to be seen as authoritative brands that understand these customers. By and large, people don't trust finance brands, but they do trust media brands," Director says.

That logic matters beyond traditional media. Research into AI search has found that answer engines frequently cite established news organizations for finance and insurance queries, reinforcing the value of being associated with sources that already carry editorial credibility. The broader lesson is the same: finance is arriving late to a lesson other categories absorbed years ago. Scale does not guarantee attention, and institutional authority does not automatically transfer to every piece of content a bank produces.

"If you're going to get people to trust you enough to give you more of their life savings or their financial behaviors, you're going to need to become sophisticated marketers and figure this out, like all these other categories have had to do," Director says.