Most ISA campaigns are sleepwalking. Here’s what we’d do differently.

The first quarter of 2026 saw several major ISA campaigns land within weeks of each other. Almost none of them shifted the conversation, and the category isn’t broken so much as it’s running on autopilot.

Try, without looking, to name an ISA advert from the last six weeks, not the brand, the actual idea, the line or the scene that you’d quote back to a colleague. Most people working outside financial services marketing can’t, and a fair number of people working inside it struggle too.

That’s not because nothing has been spent. Hargreaves Lansdown launched its most ambitious campaign in years – a beautifully crafted 60-second film charting 45 years of British political change outside Number 10, made by Wonderhood Studios. Scottish Friendly ran its first-ever TV campaign in 164 years, built around families investing for their children’s futures. Twenty of the UK’s largest financial firms pooled funding for the Investment Association’s “Invest for the Future” campaign, fronted by a Savvy Squirrel.

All landed within weeks of each other… all disappeared into the same fog.

This isn’t a critique of any one campaign

The HL film is genuinely well-made, Scottish Friendly’s launch is a sensible step for a mutual that’s been quiet for too long, though the squirrel will divide opinion, at least it’s a brand asset someone is trying to build. 
All three sit in the investment ISA space: stocks and shares ISAs, Lifetime ISAs, and Junior ISAs. Cash ISA marketing has its own version of the sameness problem, but the audience, the decision, and the campaign rhythm are different enough to be considered separately. 

The problem isn’t the work itself. It’s the assumption sitting underneath all of it that ISA marketing is a six-week shouting match aimed at people already in-market, and that “trust us, we’ve been doing this a while” is a position rather than wallpaper.

That assumption is expensive. According to Kantar’s 2025 financial services creative analysis, attention to advertising is dropping by around 31% year on year, with creative sameness and templated formats named as the main causes. Their analysis of more than 2,300 financial services ads found that the category consistently underperforms in attention, emotional engagement, and brand linkage. Only 51% of household financial decision-makers say financial advertising speaks to their lives. Among women, that drops to 45%.
It’s a strategic problem, not a creative one. 

Nobody opens an ISA because they want an ISA

An investment ISA is a wrapper. £20,000 a year tax-free allowance, set by HMRC, broadly comparable across providers. The Lifetime ISA exists for two specific purposes: a first home or retirement after 60. The Junior ISA exists to give a child a financial start at 18. Stocks and shares ISAs hold investments.

That’s the whole product.

Yet most ISA advertising treats the wrapper itself as the hero. “Make your money work harder.” “Invest in your future.” “Take control of your tomorrow.” If you stripped the logos off, you couldn’t tell the brands apart. You couldn’t tell which campaigns were aimed at twenty-somethings buying their first flat and which were aimed at parents thinking about university fees.

The real reasons people open ISAs are specific:

• Saving for a house deposit
• Topping up a pension
• Building an emergency fund big enough to leave a job
• Helping a kid through university without saddling them with debt
• Putting money aside in case a parent needs care
• Making sure something’s left for the grandchildren
• Occasionally, “what shall I do with my bonus?”

These are the conversations people are having at kitchen tables, and at least three-quarters of them aren’t happening in ISA campaigns.

The brands doing it differently are the ones that anchor the message to the use case. 

Moneybox built its early growth around the LISA-for-first-home story, with content that walked through what £4,000 a year plus the government’s 25% bonus does to a deposit timeline. They sound less like financial services and more like a friend who happens to know what they’re doing because they’ve picked one job to be useful for, rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

The financial education open goal

The FCA’s Financial Lives 2024 survey found that of UK adults with significant cash savings and no investments, 54% hadn’t even considered investing. The two biggest barriers? Worry about losing money (34%) and a lack of knowledge or support (29%).

Three in ten people with cash to invest say they don’t know enough to start. Separate research commissioned by Stratiphy found that figure rises sharply when you ask people who are considering investing: 74% say they don’t have enough information to make informed decisions. The closer people get to the decision, the more clearly they see what they don’t know. That’s a category-wide signal that the brands they’re encountering aren’t doing enough to help.

This is what the IA’s “Invest for the Future” campaign is trying to address and credit to the industry for funding it collectively. But it’s also the gap that every individual ISA brand could be filling all year round, not just in March.

Most treat financial education as a content marketing afterthought. Six listicles on the blog, a glossary nobody reads, maybe a calculator. Then back to the brand campaign, which talks about confidence and control without ever explaining what compound interest does to a £100-a-month direct debit over 30 years.

The brands that take education seriously as a strategy – not as a CSR line item – build something more durable than a campaign. The work compounds. Each piece of useful content earns a bit more trust, makes the next visit more likely, and shortens the distance between a question and a product decision. 

When the FCA’s Consumer Duty shifted from implementation to enforcement this year, the bar moved with it. Helping customers understand what they’re being sold is now something firms have to evidence, not assume. Education has stopped being a marketing choice and started being part of the job.

ISA season is the wrong campaign window

The structural problem with ISA marketing is that everyone runs at the same time. January through early April. The same channels. The same messages. The same urgency.

That window made sense when ISAs were a once-a-year tax decision, and the only reminder people needed was the deadline. It makes much less sense now, when most people researching their first investment, their first home, their first retirement plan are doing it in the moments their lives change – a pay rise, a new job, a baby on the way, a parent moving into care, a divorce, a redundancy, a bonus. Those moments don’t cluster in March.

An always-on approach doesn’t mean spending the same budget over 12 months instead of 6 weeks. It means showing up in the moments that matter, with content built for the decision someone is making. A first-time buyer searching “how much deposit do I need” in October isn’t going to see your ISA Season TV spot until February. By then, they’ve made their plan with whoever did show up.

The ISA season campaign should be the loudest moment in a year-round conversation. Right now, for most brands, it’s the only conversation they’re having.

Who the calendar is built for

The gap between what men and women invest in the UK now stands at around £678 billion, according to Boring Money’s 2025 analysis – a figure that grew by £1.2 billion last year. Men hold 71% of all invested assets. Among 18-34-year-olds, men invest at roughly twice the rate as women. None of this is news to anyone working in the sector. What’s worth examining is the campaign format we keep running at it.

The usual explanation for the gap is risk appetite, and that explanation is getting harder to defend. Nutmeg’s 2025 data shows that 89% of its female clients hold medium-to-high risk portfolios, compared with 92% of its male clients. Among millennial women, more are planning to increase their risk this year than millennial men. Whatever’s slowing things down, it’s not a different relationship with risk.

A different pair of numbers might be more useful. Barclays data shows 55% of their customers with savings balances over £20,000 are women, while only 31% of their Smart Investor sign-ups are. Same bank, same customers, the same cash that could be invested. The same data set also shows that women who do open an investment account take, on average, four months from first consideration to opening one. Men take three.

That extra month is worth thinking about. The ISA season campaign window lasts about 6 weeks. If a prospect is two months into a four-month consideration cycle, the countdown clock arrives in the wrong part of the journey. By the time they’re ready, the campaign has gone quiet. The pressure isn’t motivating, it’s mistimed.

It’s tempting to read this as a story about marketing to women specifically, but it’s probably more useful to read it as a story about the limits of urgency as a default mode. Plenty of people – of any gender – prefer to deliberate, research and act when the timing suits them rather than when a marketing calendar suggests it should. The current ISA playbook is calibrated for the prospect who’s already decided. The brands that work out how to be present and useful through the longer consideration window are the ones that’ll reach the rest.

What we’d do

We’ve spent over 15 years working with banks, building societies, insurers and fintechs. Most of the briefs we see frame the regulatory environment as the reason creative work has to play it safe. We don’t think that’s the real problem. The real problem is that briefs in financial services often start from the product wrapper rather than the customer’s decision, and they default to a calendar window rather than a behavioural one.

A better starting point looks something like this:

1. Pick the specific job an ISA is doing for a defined audience. First home. University. Career break. Inheritance. Receiving a bonus. Don’t try to talk to everyone about everything.
2. Build the educational content first. The campaign sits on top of it, not instead of it.
3. Plan for moments, not seasons. Map the life events and search behaviours that trigger the decision, then show up there.
4. Plan for the consideration, not the conversion window. Some of your best prospects will take months to decide. Be there when they’re ready, not just when you’re shouting.
5. Treat compliance as a creative constraint, not a creative excuse. The risk warnings and Consumer Duty requirements are demanding, but they apply to every competitor. The firms that work harder within them stand out faster.

None of this is radical, it’s just rare in a category that has trained itself to repeat last year’s winners.
The ISA hasn’t changed. The wrapper is still a wrapper. But the brands that understand it as a means to a specific end – and that show up across the whole year, not just the last six weeks of the tax year – will be the ones people remember when the decision matters.

If you’re sketching out the brief for next year’s ISA campaign and the early conversations feel familiar, you might want to join our free webinar on 27th May: “Regulated. Not Restricted. How to write briefs that unlock brilliant creative work in financial services.” We’ll cover practical frameworks for separating real compliance constraints from the assumptions that quietly kill creative work, and how to write briefs that produce something the audience will remember.