Lead a six-person student agency and built an integrated campaign for a Gen-Z audience who’d been told a hundred times that money is “complicated” — and decided it didn’t have to be.
Our client wanted to reach Gen Z about personal finance — a category historically dominated by either jargon-heavy banks or finance-bro TikToks. Neither was working. The brief: build a brand identity, voice, and full integrated campaign that could earn attention from 18–24-year-olds without talking down to them.
My role focused on content strategy, social architecture, and brand voice. I led the research and strategy that informed every downstream creative decision and designed a cohesive book.
Our client wanted to reach Gen Z about personal finance — a category historically dominated by either jargon-heavy banks or finance-bro TikToks. Neither was working. The brief: build a brand identity, voice, and full integrated campaign that could earn attention from 18–24-year-olds without talking down to them.
My role focused on content strategy, social architecture, and brand voice. I led the audience research that informed every downstream creative decision and partnered closely with our designer on visual direction.
Before we wrote a single tagline, we ran a multi-method research phase: a survey with 200+ respondents, six longform interviews, and a competitor audit across 14 brands. The patterns were sharper than we expected.
From there we built four audience personas, each with their own content pillars and platform priorities. That document became the spine of the rest of the campaign.
We built the campaign around a single creative platform — “The Simple Road” — that reframed money management as a series of small, manageable moves rather than a giant intimidating system. Every channel ladder rolled up to that idea.
The deliverable was a 120+ page campaign book covering brand identity, voice guidelines, social calendars, paid media flighting, influencer matrix, and a measurement framework. Every piece was production-ready — the kind of document a real agency would hand to a client at end of pitch.
The capstone earned an A+ from the faculty review panel. More importantly, it taught me what “owning a strategy spine” actually means: making a hundred small decisions that all defend the same big idea.
Survey + interview synthesis, four personas, opportunity gaps mapped against the competitive set.
Voice principles, do/don’t examples, and a tone matrix calibrated by channel and audience moment.
Three-pillar framework, channel-specific cadence, and 30+ post templates ready for production.
Meta & TikTok inspiration, audience targeting, creative variants, and budget allocation across the funnel.
Before we wrote a single tagline, we ran a multi-method research phase: a survey with 200+ respondents, six longform interviews, and a competitor audit across 14 brands. The patterns were sharper than we expected.
From there, we built four audience personas, each with their own content pillars and platform priorities. That document became the backbone of the rest of the campaign.
The strategy wasn’t to teach Gen Z about money. It was to treat them like they’d already started — and meet them there.
We built the campaign around a single creative platform — “The Simple Road” — that reframed money management as a series of small, manageable moves rather than a giant intimidating system. Every channel ladder rolled up to that idea.
This was the first project where I owned the strategy spine of a real campaign from research to measurement plan. A few things I’m taking into the next role:
The full campaign book.
120+ pages.Public.