Making A.I
marketing’s M.O
Barclays’ GenAI Creative Transformation.
0 to 1 in under six months
No playbook. No precedent. No heavily-regulated brand had shipped GenAI integrated advertising with results worth talking about. Barclays wanted to be the first FS brand – with the governance to match.
So, we set about with healthy caution in compliance, legal, and risk – and plenty of big disruption energy in our client + agency team.
Of all the brands I’ve been on the GenAI creative journey with, this was one of the most gratifying. Pioneers expect to get mud in their eyes and arrows in their backs. Instead, we received an award short-listing.
Orchestrating Art + Science
Our Pencil Pro–powered AI tech stack was bleeding edge, and the creative and craft expertise I brought was 25 years in the making. I relished the chance to both do and direct right at the coal face.
Our obsession was inputs. Because outputs are only ever as good as what you feed the machine – insight, proof points, judgement, and creative taste.
The tech is just the accelerant. Taste is the true multiplier for a brand.
Proof at pace
1. Barclaycard Avios Plus – the first pressure test
Credit card acquisition is a performance battleground and traditional optimisation had plateaued. Using Pencil Pro, we built richer audience understanding and scaled an asset-rich campaign across 16 passion-led segments. Then ran it head to head against the top performing control campaign.
• The Result: A fresh, creative platform that pushed hard on the brand’s playful side – and did the business.
• The Proof: Beating a highly-optimised control with 14:1+ ROI.
• The Efficiency: Time-to-market halved. Production costs cut by 70%.
See the full case study here
…from surreal to so real…
2. Barclays Current Accounts – scaling success
We repeated our new model. Same Sprint-like approach. Same human–AI hybrid rhythm. Same all-in culture. Same restriction on representing real people. Completely different creative platform – because AI ads needn’t look “AI”.
In another straight creative shootout, our GenAI’d campaign unequivocally outperformed the control. Meta’s Ad Delivery system rapidly favoured it –supported by a 44% higher CTR, the Meta machine eventually allocated 84% of all delivery and the campaign drove 88% of clicks to conversion.
One successful test is a story. Two is a system.
Our switcher campaign ran during a period without the usual cash incentive. So, the next best benefit to hero is the app’s feature set:
Beyond campaigns and onto new capabilities
Alongside proving brand craft and perfromance, we expanded into bespoke tools and experiences including:
A bespoke tool empowering dozens of marketers to self-serve on-brand copy. The back-end, built on my own CopyPlan IP, guided users through the right inputs – audience, desired action, proof points – in the right tone. It freed creatives to focus their energy on the briefs that benefit most from human expertise.
CopywriterPlus
Embracing the brand campaign at festivals: What you buy is your business. Helping you pay less interest is ours.
A synthetic junior placement team that never sleeps. Brand-immersed. Trained to ping-pong, ideate, and self-edit against creative standards. Sitting in on briefs, they returned concepts and kernels worth developing. Sometimes the best way to get a great idea is to have a lot of ideas.
Aleks & Indy©
Early on, to kill doubt about AI production quality, I recreated a Barclaycard TVC through GenAI.
Rather than a mood board, it was a fork-in-the-road quality test. (Text to Video, not Image to Video – and over a few long nights, not multiple months.)
And it proved we could get damn near traditional production standards befitting the brand – even at the more budget conscious ends of the funnel.
Brand-worthy &
brand building
The bridge from "new work" to "new value". With this new process, we refreshed, re-energised or repurposed existing assets without costly reshoots. Practical, brand-safe, and scalable. In a bank, that's how innovation actually sticks.
The simple GenAI recreation on the right takes the same concept of the original stock image, but adds viewer attachment with the to-camera composition, better engagement through the new animation.
GenAI Glow Up
The Outcome
Six months of innovative live pilots proved Human+AI hybrid performance marketing could deliver on the commercials and the brand – at speed, at scale, and under governance constraints.
And all of the fast fails and success at speed has created one helluva playbook to lift and shift to other brands.
Soon as Claude shipped artifacts, I vibe-coded a proactive, brand experience rooted in financial psychology. It helped people understand their relationship with money, why it is the way it is, and what they can do about it.
Your Money Mind turned "Make Money Work for You" from a brand promise to a plan of action. It also demonstrated GenAI can build brand value through tools, not just ads.
From the pretotype here, the ambition was is to create the world’s first interactive financial psychotherapist.
In the meantime, a pared back pilot went live over over summer.
(Understand your own financial autobiography here.)