Mettle Mondays

The pandemic led to a 14% increase in new businesses as Brits turned their passions into side gigs or hustles. By 2030 it is estimated that 50% of UK adults will have a side gig of some kind.

Side hustlers and freelancers occupy a growing banking space. This audience also have simple banking needs and requirements that are often historically underserved or unavailable from either the big retail or commercial banks. Mettle’s purpose is to give everyone the financial confidence to turn their passion into opportunity.

Despite launching in 2019, there was still an important awareness and consideration task for Mettle within a sea of ever-growing financial and fintech communications in the market. We had to find a poignant moment to capture the attention of this growing sect of bankers.

The moment we selected wasn’t a singular date in the calendar, but a day in the week that we could activate around every week. Driven by the insights that business bank account search was 14% higher on Mondays, and that freelancer site, Fiverr, has the most orders on a Monday,  alongside Twitter’s Happy sentiment gauge which was 10% lower on Mondays.

So, we created Mettle Mondays. This was a media movement, not a just campaign; it sat outside the rules of conventional banking, and inspired change at the very moment side hustlers and freelancers were the most receptive. Mettle was unmissable, dominating key media touch points for side hustlers and freelancers every Monday.

The Mettle movement launched on the first Monday of January, when new year resolutions are set, and people look at making new starts. TV and VOD was centred on creating fame that inspired change, leveraging passion programming such as baking and pottery to align with Mettle’s purpose, as well as surrounding some of the most famously watched shows in January

Aligning to our AV upweights, we dominated Mondays with large format, unmissable digital OOH sites across London. We captured side hustler and freelancer opportunity audiences on traditional commuter journeys across rail, underground and roadside, inspiring change with social proofing.

With the rise of FinTok, social media is becoming a channel for inspiration for the passion economy, so every Monday we invited real life side hustlers and freelancers to tell their success story and inspire the next generation to join the movement with ‘a day in the life’ curated content. We capitalised on the right online moments, matching personable and relatable video content with contextual targeting to reach our audiences when they were consuming educational content around bringing their passion economy to life.