Personal Capital
Finance finally willing to say what everyone was thinking.
San Francisco is not a city you can talk down to. It's a city full of people who built companies, disrupted industries, and quietly accumulated wealth while traditional financial institutions were still designing brochures in navy blue and reassuring stock photography. Personal Capital needed to speak to that audience, and to everyone else in the city who'd ever felt patronized by a financial brand, in language that was direct, confident, and just self-aware enough to earn a second look on a billboard.
Executive Creative Direction/HUB Strategy: Peter Judd
Creative Direction: Sean M. Smith
Design: Sean M. Smith, Edward Taylor
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OOH Campaign · Billboard & Transit · Print · Digital/Social · Visual System · Concept Development
The Brief
The assignment was an interim campaign to run across San Francisco (billboards, transit, BART, print) while a longer-term brand platform was developed.
There's pressure on interim work to play it safe, to hold back the best thinking for the "real" campaign. The decision here was the opposite: lead with the sharpest possible headline and build a visual system strong enough to hold it at every scale, from a full-size billboard on the 101 to a bus shelter on Market Street.
The campaign needed two things simultaneously: enough wit to stop someone mid-commute, and enough visual sophistication to make Personal Capital look like a brand worth trusting with your money.
The Idea
Want some financial advice? Stop overpaying for financial advice.
The headline does everything. It opens with the question every financial brand asks, then immediately turns it back on the category. It's the kind of line that works because it's true, and it respects the intelligence of the person reading it.
The visual system was built to carry that confidence. Two distinct directions were explored: a bold typographic hierarchy built on dark fields, and a kaleidoscopic color bar system drawn directly from Personal Capital's own product UI, both designed to be as direct and uncluttered as the words themselves.
The Work
The campaign ran across multiple formats throughout San Francisco: large format billboards, BART and transit placements, bus shelters, and print.
Each format was designed for how it would actually be encountered: a billboard read at speed, a bus shelter read at a standstill, a print ad read at leisure. The typographic system held up across all of them without losing the tightness of the idea.
The two visual concepts, Bars and Kaleidoscope, gave the campaign flexibility across placements while keeping a single, unmistakable voice.
The Outcome
A campaign that said something.
Personal Capital named the problem out loud and positioned itself as the solution, all in one headline, in a category where most brands were still competing on safety and reassurance.