Don't Be Fine With It
The Pepperstone brand campaign, titled “Don’t Be Fine With It”, was a bold, challenger-style campaign aimed at experienced traders who had grown complacent with their subpar brokers.
Through emotionally resonant storytelling and sharp visual metaphors, the campaign urged traders to reconsider what they had come to accept as “fine” and switch to Pepperstone—positioned as the best trade they’ll ever make.
I led the creative direction and visual strategy for the global campaign rollout across digital, print and OOH channels with tailored visuals, landing pages, and localised creative variants to maximise impact globally.
Client
Pepperstone
DELIVERABLES
Creative direction
Visual Strategy
Programmatic Display
Social
OOH
Year
2024
Role
Creative lead
TVCs
Working with Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand, two TVCs anchored the campaign. One featured tennis legend John McEnroe, whose iconic intolerance for mediocrity reinforced the campaign’s message, and the other was set in a corporate environment highlighting poor service.
I provided direction on the supplementary stills we needed to support the adaptation of the campaign across social and programatic channels, providing enough variety to support the wide range of messages we would be using in the campaign.
I designed a visual system that could be used to support messaging across placements for digital, print and OOH. I took the angle from the tail of the "P" within the Pepperstone logomark and utilised it as a visual device to create a separation between the challenger messaging and the resolution to "switch to Pepperstone". The system was adaptable to work as static or in an animated sequence.
To give the messaging more visual cut through within the creative I introduced a bold new display typeface as part of Pepperstone's visual identity. As this was a global campaign that needed to be localised into nine languages, I had to give special consideration to fall back fonts for languages without a Latin-based alphabet and provide guidance to the team on how to use them in terms of scale so that we could maintain consistency across regions.
Programatic display formed a key channel for the campaign to support the two TVCs. Dynamic creative was launched globally across Pepperstone's eight financial licenses and localised into nine languages. A total of 40 unique messages were adapted to regional markets, resulting in over 1000 creative variants being produced.
The campaign leveraged a mix of direct deal placements across high-visibility websites, such as Bloomberg and investing.com. I designed homepage takeovers to maximise brand exposure among professional traders and financial audiences.
