Arts & Letters Becomes Wealthfront’s Lead Creative Agency

Little Black Book can exclusively reveal that Wealthfront, a US-based fintech organisation, has appointed Arts & Letters as its lead creative agency following a competitive pitch. It marks the beginning of the largest creative agency relationship in Wealthfront’s history.

“We wanted to find an agency who could help develop a creative platform that connects with our audience and sets us firmly apart from the rest of the finance category,” says Jamie Kelly, VP of marketing at Wealthfront. “To do that, we were looking for collaborators who understood our brand values, audience’s pain points, and came with sharp cultural insights.”

“From the jump we loved that Wealthfront has a mission to build a financial system that favours people, not institutions,” says Molly Jamison, executive creative director at Arts & Letters. “Many of us were existing users who were already brand ambassadors for the product within our own circles.”

Jamie adds that he and the Wealthfront team identified Arts & Letters as “incredible systems-thinkers”. While it’s important for campaigns to grab the audience’s attention at a particular point in time, Wealthfront was also keen to develop a durable brand and creative platform that it can build into for years to come. “From the initial concepts to visual and motion designs, it’s clear that building scalable systems is one of Arts & Letters’ superpowers,” says Jamie. “We also found their ability to respond, collaborate and iterate on ideas to be unique.”

Wealthfront was a pioneer of the robo-advisor industry, which generally takes the form of algorithm-driven financial planning and investment services. It has since grown into a consumer fintech leader that offers innovative saving and investing products, and aims to make it easier for customers to understand their financial picture, and give consumers more effective ways to build wealth, while making the complicated and clunky world of finance simpler, smarter and all around better.

The engagement with Arts & Letters follows a period of rapid growth as Wealthfront has enhanced its offering across its high interest ‘cash account’, and modernised approaches to stock and bond investing. It now oversees more than $75 billion in assets for more than one million clients. 

All of this also feeds into the brand’s desire and need for a durable but stringent brand platform. “While it’s never a bad time to sharpen your brand platform,” says Jamie, “in the last few years, we’ve expanded our product suite and seen a lot of momentum in what we’re building.” He sees Wealthfront as a “truly a special brand” in its category. The business model is designed to put clients first, and it has built its products and brand around trying to “do things differently” from the rest of the players in the financial industry. “Our growth has created even more opportunities to deliver more value to our clients,” he adds. “We’re excited to launch a new brand platform that unifies our products and brings the value we provide our clients to life in a clever and memorable way.”

Arts & Letters won this pitch not only with its vision for the brand platform. The team also demonstrated a collaborative approach with Wealthfront’s internal creative team. “From the inception of Arts & Letters, we’ve built our approach to integrate seamlessly with internal creative teams,” says Molly. “We believe this is a truth of the modern marketing world - that for brands to operate with the requisite speed and agility, it requires creative talent on both sides flexing as one team to meet any moment.” In fact, Arts & Letters was born out of an internal creative team. Founder Charles Hodges spent formative time at the Google Creative Lab prior to launching his own studio. The Google Creative Lab was also Arts & Letters’ first client, and is now its oldest partnership.

As a brand leader, Jamie sees this kind of health collaboration between creative teams as ‘paramount’. “We have an incredible in-house creative team that has built our brand and knows our audience inside and out,” he says. “Yet despite our growth, we’re still a scrappy startup – and we never want to lose that mentality. That means we move quickly, we test a lot, and everyone on the team likes to roll up their sleeves. Arts & Letters is no stranger to working in these environments – and immediately felt like an extension of our team.”

What’s more, Arts & Letters has extensive experience of working with both B2B and B2C tech partners with its history of working across numerous Google products, HubSpot, Zola and more. “While it is different with every brand,” says Molly, “we have noticed a few themes over the years.” 

The first, she adds, is the ability to simplify the complex. “We’ve found success in creating common language that breaks down the barriers audiences often feel around complex tech. We’re particularly excited for the opportunity to apply this approach to saving and investing in our work with Wealthfront.”

The second is to find the ‘emotional centre’ between the audience truth and the product truth, which, Arts & Letters believe, is generally what leads to creating work that has real business impact. “And then lastly, by focusing on building durable brand platforms rather than living campaign-to-campaign, we create a foundation which creates consistency up and down the marketing funnel, works across products, and creates internal organisational alignment,” says Molly.

The first new work from the collaboration is already in pre-production and is expected to launch later this year. In fact, Jamie conducts this very interview from the set in Mexico City, along with an “unbelievably talented director”, producing initial work that he believes “will bring a fresh creative approach to match the innovation in our products to what is often a category full of predictable tropes”.

“We’re excited that the work will represent a totally different approach for the category, one that matches what Wealthfront has pioneered with their products,” says Molly.

“Wealthfront is one of those brands you feel lucky to work on as an agency. They have it all – an innovative product, a great brand foundation, and a world class marketing and creative team committed to making great work. It’s always refreshing to get to work with a team who has the same big dreams as you, and we quickly learned that they wanted to continue to build something special.”