** New copy:
Avios Plus – breaking a performance plateau

Credit card acquisition is one of the toughest performance battlegrounds in financial services. Optimised to death. Highly competitive. And our existing work had plateaued. We used Pencil Pro to build richer audience understanding and scale to 16 tailored segments across passions. Then we brought it to life with a playful, photoreal GenAI world: anthropomorphised animals living their dream holidays – designed to make Avios feel tangible, motivating, and personal.

The results proved the model. Against a highly tuned control campaign, the GenAI work delivered 33% higher view-through rates and a 2.5% uplift in sales, with a 14.43:1 ROI. It also halved production timelines and reduced production costs by 70%. In confidential terms, CPA beat BAU and significantly outperformed the annualised Avios Plus benchmark.

The inflection point came when the platform idea landed so hard it challenged the brand’s established conventions. The best-quality AI models required to realise it weren’t yet approved on ethical and indemnification grounds. Rather than stall or dilute the ambition, we built a second campaign in parallel at double pace. That pressure test became an advantage. We effectively ran the end-to-end process twice – and what emerged was a refined, repeatable three-week Sprint-like process.

** TO UPDATE **Travel reward credit card acquisition is one of the most highly-optimised and highly-competitive categories, and Barclaycard’s marketing performance had hit a plateau. They’d need an innovative new approach to reach the next level of campaign effectiveness and ROI.

GenAI promised much, but with unproven results and uncertain quality it was a huge leap for a financial services brand to take.

Our goal was to prove that an entirely new end-to-end human and AI hybrid model could acquirenew customers, outperform our control, halve production timelines, cut costs, and still deliver fresh creative engagement.

Our strategy was to get personal about travel. In collaboration with AI we built richer audience profiles that scaled to 16 tailored segments across key passions.

Then our creative platform brought this to life via AI-generated animals enjoying each audience segment’s dream holiday – delivering emotion and playfulness befitting of the brand.

Results proved revolutionary: 33% higher view-through rates and 2.5% uplift in sales versus the control campaign. Production timelines shortened by 50% while costs decreased by 70%.

Finally, it delivered an ROI of 14:1