Monzo’s chief marketer on why its growth hinges on changing the way we look at money

Speaking during a fireside chat at The Drum Live 2024, Monzo’s vice-president of marketing, AJ Coyne, says the bank has grown “exponentially” year-on-year, boasting 10 million users today, but has hit a point where it needs to scale. Coyne says, “Monzo can’t do that in the same channels that it worked on in the past, and so above-the-line, high-reach media, investing in brand, is critical to that success.”

The bank tasked consultancy TwentyFirstCenturyBrand to write its brand strategy, understand its key attributes and difference in market as well as the overall business ambition. “The job was to codify what makes Monzo Monzo,” Coyne says. To get this project off the ground, Coyne needed buy-in from all parts of the business so TwentyFirstCenturyBrand worked with all departments from C-suite to product and marketing.

Monzo kicked off this brand work by reflecting on what money means to people and its own role within money. “Money creates all different feelings. It can make you anxious, it can make you stressed and it can make you awkward,” Coyne says. “One in three people would like to deep clean their bathroom – deep clean with rubber gloves and everything – rather than check their savings.”

Money taboos are seldom tackled or presented in banking advertising. “For everyone else [other banks], it’s ‘a better tomorrow is today’ and ‘beautiful futures’ but the reality is it’s quite different for everybody and so leaning into that truth was a core part of the brief,” Coyne says.

Before investing in brand, Coyne says it’s “critical” to know what metrics are most important to measure. “Yes, we’ve got the brand metrics we’re tracking so we want to see increases in awareness, increases in ad recall, increases in consideration, trust... but we also want to see impact on organic and the bottom line,” he says. Because it had been so long since Monzo went above the line, its data team needed to set the marketing team up to be able to measure these kinds of campaigns through mixed modeling.

For the creative, Monzo purposely wanted something “incredibly” different for the category – “that was a key critical principle we had.” Coyne tasked Uncommon, the creative agency known for driving “buzz, fame and culture,” to develop the TVC and out-of-home ads.

The campaign performed well but Coyne admits it could do better in the next iteration. One way Monzo is planning to tweak the campaign to have a bigger impact on its next run is to supplement the hero spot with additional pieces of content. That's based on a learning from a series of ads that integrated Monzo messaging into Channel 4 programs such as First Dates and Married at First Sight. When these spots were served alongside a Monzo product story, Coyne says its consideration metrics jumped tenfold. “The big learning is actually, how can we integrate that extra layer in future and future iterations of the campaign,” he says.

Getting out of the London bubble

Monzo’s average demographic is 33 years old. To scale it isn’t thinking of aging up or down, but instead to expand beyond its “London bubble” and gain awareness across the UK. One way it is doing that is by forging partnerships with other brands like Greggs, which gives perks to members such as free bakery products. Monzo promoted this partnership by building an ATM vending machine that dispenses free Gregg’s sausage rolls. “We have huge legitimacy in that partnership, based on our consumer data,” Coyne says. “From a data-led decision-making process, it’s a no-brainer.”

What’s also a no-brainer for Coyne is investing in its own brand. And for the foreseeable future, that's exactly what Monzo intends to do.

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