UBS Group AG is a multinational investment bank and financial services company founded and based in Switzerland. It manages the largest amount of private wealth in the world, counting approximately half of the world’s billionaires among its clients.

In March 2023, UBS agreed to buy Credit Suisse, one of its main competitors, for $3.25 billion (CHF 3 billion), in an emergency rescue deal brokered by the Swiss government that entailed UBS inheriting Credit Suisse’s private clients. Under the global spotlight, the brand needed a new campaign platform to:

1: Reassure existing clients that the bank’s increase in scale would not impact the quality of service they receive.

2: Persuade clients inherited from Credit Suisse to remain with their new bank and avoid a run on the bank’s reserves.

3: Enable UBS to continue delivering on its growth strategy and attract new HNW clients in established and emerging markets.

4: Re-inspire trust in the brand among the global financial community.

Pre-campaign analysis of our pre-existing communication assets highlighted the need for audience development and refinement to better align with UBS’s objective of targeting high net worth individuals (HNWIs) – an extremely small consumer segment.

UBS understands this demographic better than any other bank or luxury brand. Clients with over 1 million dollars of investible assets form the brand’s customer base. Our strategy was to combine internal research, market analysis, and our first-party data to unlock the value of this knowledge while respecting Switzerland’s strict banking confidentiality laws.

By leveraging data clean rooms – a privacy-safe, next-generation targeting solution – we redefined what’s possible in financial services marketing. This allowed us to precisely reach high-value audiences while fully respecting strict privacy laws. In a compelling juxtaposition, a legacy industry embraced cutting-edge technology not to bypass regulations, but to honour them in smarter, more future-ready ways.

The central creative idea of this work was to position UBS’s wealth management services under the concept of ‘craft’ with the platform “Banking is our Craft”.

As a Swiss bank with a 160-year heritage, UBS was in a uniquely credible position to claim this brand truth.
The campaign needed to activate the concept of craft at every communication level, helping the brand to position its financial services as a bespoke luxury experience. This demanded an overhaul of the brand’s client-facing language.

Four short films were produced, as well as a series of powerful stills shot in Los Angeles, Vancouver and Tokyo, creating a campaign that visually and narratively embodied the very qualities of craft it promoted.

Content partnerships were developed to make the craft story come to life and engage our audience through editorial, video, and interactive games.

Exclusive money-can’t-buy experiences were developed that bring target segments closer to the craft they are most passionate about, with untold stories that go deep into the craft of our partners, ambassadors, employees and clients.

For 2024, we developed an audience-led, connected journey, supported by a full-funnel strategy that was three-part:

1: Prime our high-net-worth target in environments that communicate stature and value of the brand, through highly-visible channels (e.g. OOH, Print, Digital, Content Partnerships). This would create more people who are familiar with UBS, and more likely to be predisposed to UBS when they are in-market.

2: Nurture the target through the journey by using data signals and triggers that indicate in-market potential, inviting the target to spend time with the brand through a value exchange. This would create more people engaging with the brand, and more people considering UBS as a preferred / potential option.

3: Convert interested audiences by using behavioural triggers and calls-to-action to entice the target to get in touch and experience our craft in action. This would generate more leads for UBS to convert to clients.

And this was powered by a world first for our category.

Using Decentriq’s data clean rooms – a privacy-safe, next generation targeting solution – we gained deep behavioural insights into our target audience. These were scaled up to create new lookalike audiences, allowing us to precisely reach new high-value targets while fully complying with data privacy laws.

We fully embraced machine learning to help us execute our targeting strategy. With our, and our publishing partners’, encrypted first-party data, we created AI-based “lookalike” audiences to guide our targeting. Then, we enabled systems to monitor the audiences and assign budget to those performing best.

As a global initiative covering all markets and campaigns, our approach evolved iteratively, analysing responses and user interactions (e.g., landing page visits, form submissions) from lookalike audiences to refine future targeting in a continuous optimisation loop.

By reframing its existing partnerships and sponsorship engagements through the lens of the campaign, the brand was able to guide conversations on the craft behind fashion, art, Formula 1, and other fields.

A truly global campaign, it reached high-net-worth-individuals across key markets including the United States, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Brazil, and Mexico.

+9% increase in brand familiarity
+13% increase in brand preference

+98% onsite engagement lift in Singapore with SPH publishing partner
+52% onsite engagement lift in the US with Wall Street Journal

• 87.84% of all leads and 79.24% of quality visits came from AI-lookalike audiences
• 46% percent drop in Cost-per-Quality Visit
• 50% drop in Cost-per-Form Success
• 19% of clicks from the lookalike audiences resulted in a quality visit, the highest conversion rate across all targeting methods

Double digit growth in all advertising metrics:
(Average increase across all Tier-1 markets (US, HK, SG), year-on-year)

Ad Performance (+16%p)

• Ad awareness (+15%p)
• Tagline awareness (+23%p)
• Tagline association to UBS (+19%p)

Creative Evaluation (+11%p)

• Appealing (+19%p)
• Relevant (+14%p)

Conveyed Image (+16%p)

• High quality (+20%p)
• Innovative (+15%p)

Brand Fit (+14%p)

• Ads make sense (+13p%)
• Makes me curious (+11%p)

Client global website