Comparing Starling Bank and Monzo’s TV adverts
The new Starling advert highlights some of the differences between the two challenger bank’s approaches to marketing.
How they got here
Starling Bank has just released it’s first television advert today, while Monzo released theirs earlier in the year.
This isn’t quite the first time that Starling have produced video ads, they experimented with a campaign back in August last year that ran for a while in cinemas. But the adverts were lower budget and the campaign appeared to be fairly small scale. Both banks also ran a series of billboard ads in advance.
The TV ads are a pretty significant milestone for the challengers who have spent a lot less on customer acquisition than the incumbents and relied heavily on word of mouth recommendations to drive their growth. Those can only carry them so far though, before they need to start reaching out to a more diverse nationwide audience. So for many people, this will have been the first time that they heard about the banks.
The two banks have always taken very different approaches to marketing, with Monzo taking a more community orientated, casual and perhaps, occasionally too informal, approach to presenting themselves and Starling being more reserved, focusing on building trust but somewhat lacking personality.
Reaching out to new audiences
Monzo still seemed to be focusing on millennials as their target audience, judging by the age of the actors and the situations that they find themselves in.
Whereas Starling’s advert features a family, with the choice of music and focus on the starling bird suggesting that they’re targeting an older audience. The placement of the ads will be more telling.
Giving you all the feels
Both adverts use emotion to make them more memorable.
Monzo have used humour and their personality to try to create a bond with people and a sense of relatability. Their slogan “You make Monzo, Monzo”, reinforces this by emphasising their focus on the customer, not themselves and helps to remove the sense of separation between the bank and customer. The upbeat, slightly quirky backing music for Monzo’s advert gives it energy, while emphasising a sense of fun and suggests that they’re not taking themselves too seriously.
Starling’s choice of music was superb in my opinion. The opening line of the song “it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day” speaks to the fact that they’re a new, better alternative to the incumbents. While song itself is reassuringly calm at first, before crescendoing with the uplifting chorus that we’re so familiar with. This really helps to give their slogan “feel good about money” weight.
What about the cool features in the apps?
Monzo’s ads gave a rapid fire summary of some of the features that make them stand out from the competition.
There’s a tendency for people who use the challenger banks to believe that it’s features that set them apart. But in reality they have relatively few unique features and even fewer that’re compelling enough to make people switch their bank account. It’s largely the user experience and customer service, as well as lower fees in some instances, that make these banks so much better than the incumbents.
I think Monzo did well to illustrate some of those benefits but perhaps Starling have recognised the challenge here and that’s why they’ve decided not to focus on features, only showing the homepage of their app briefly as part of the advert.
So will people be persuaded to check them out?
Monzo saw a big spike in interest after their adverts launched on 22nd May, seeing 10,000 people sign up in a single day. They appeared to see lingering benefits, with a higher rate of accounts being opened each day since then, even after the ads stopped showing. So there’s no question that good old fashioned tv adverts still work, as long as you’re willing to pay for them of course.
When it comes to explaining the benefits of their service, Starling seem to be counting on the fact that they’ve been voted best bank two years in a row and that, that combined with the emotional resonance of the advert, will be enough to make people want to open an account with them. Importantly the advert doesn’t address the “but why do I need another bank account?” question. But perhaps they’ll follow up with additional adverts to explain what they offer in more detail.
When it comes to overall awareness, Starling have quite a bit of catching up to do but I expect this advert will give them a big boost.
