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Kick Out Debt Campaign

Turning a dry financial product into a campaign people actually remembered — and one that beat its goals by 40%.

Role

Creative Direction, Concept Development, Campaign Strategy

Timeline

2024–Present

Result

$1.13M in loans in 60 days — 141% of goal

Platform

Integrated campaigns, Brand Voice, Print & Digital Deliverables, Email, Web, Social

The Roommate Everyone’s Had

Debt consolidation is important — and it sounds like a pamphlet in a waiting room. Rates, terms, balances, fine print. Advantage Financial Federal Credit Union needed their signature-loan campaign to cut through, and cutting through is genuinely hard where they operate.

Their members are mostly veterans — people who’ve heard every financial pitch there is, from the big banks to the government-employee credit unions that blanket the DC market. When your audience is that sought-after and your competitors are that many, a rate sheet doesn’t stand a chance. The campaign had to earn attention before it could earn an application.

Eviction Notice

So we built the campaign around a truth everyone recognizes: debt isn’t just a number on a statement. It follows you around, takes up space in your head, and makes ordinary life feel heavier — a lot like a bad roommate. The one who eats your food, never pays their share, and is somehow always on the couch when you get home.

I led the creative direction and messaging, building the platform around one simple line: it’s time to kick debt out. We created a whole visual world around the messy, unwanted roommate, then carried it across print, branch materials, email, web, and social — memorable without ever shaming the people we were talking to. The campaign set goals of 60 loans and $800,000 in the first 60 days.

Hover and scroll to explore.

advfcu.org/debt-consolidation

The Receipts

The campaign didn’t just perform — it outperformed every goal we set:

93 loans against a goal of 60
$1.13M in loan dollars against a goal of $800K
~$100K above the credit union’s normal monthly loan production, sustained through the campaign
4 new members acquired along the way

For context: Advantage Financial historically averaged about 20 signature loans and $190K a month. This campaign more than doubled that pace — because people didn’t have to be experts in debt consolidation to understand it. They just had to know what it feels like to want something stressful out of their house.

Down the Hall

Kick Out Debt is the headline, but not the whole story. Advantage Financial’s brand voice has room for personality, and we’ve used it — a homeowner literally sitting on his ASSet to depict the usage of a home equity line of credit, a Woodstock-era Abe Lincoln promising a HIGH 4.20% Share Certificate rate, a man taking a bubble bath proving there’s No Judgment, and a commuter showing that RTO stinks but a new car doesn’t. Every product, every quarter, the same rule: if the product is dry, the work doesn’t have to be.

The Receipts

The campaign didn’t just perform — it outperformed every goal we set:

93 loans against a goal of 60
$1.13M in loan dollars against a goal of $800K
~$100K above the credit union’s normal monthly loan production, sustained through the campaign
4 new members acquired along the way

Down the Hall

Kick Out Debt is the headline, but not the whole story. Advantage Financial’s brand voice has room for personality, and we’ve used it — a homeowner literally sitting on his ASSet to depict the usage of a home equity line of credit, a Woodstock-era Abe Lincoln promising a HIGH 4.20% Share Certificate rate, a man taking a bubble bath proving there’s No Judgment, a commuter showing that RTO stinks but a new car doesn’t, and a home equity campaign that’s one HEL(L) of a rate. Every product, every quarter, the same rule: if the product is dry, the work doesn’t have to be.

Changed the Locks

This is the work I love most: taking a business problem that could be a boring headline and giving it a human shape. The fun you just saw down the hall isn’t a detour from that — it’s the proof of it. Debt consolidation had been sold as rates and terms for decades; we sold it as the roommate nobody wanted to keep. The numbers followed. That’s what happens when creative strategy starts with how people actually feel, not with what the product does.