Skipton Building Society came to EssenceMediacom last year looking for a campaign that would boost its brand consideration amid a crowded financial field. The agency’s solution was Make Your Move, a branded content series built around authenticity and anchored in real financial journeys.
In 2024, Skipton underwent a rebrand with its Founded on Fairness campaign and needed a media strategy that reflected its new direction while delivering business results. ‘2024 was a period where Skipton were going through, from a marketing point of view, a bit of a change in their new brand look and feel’, said Ben Malam, business director at EssenceMediacom.
‘We needed to support brand metrics, specifically that consideration metric for the brand, trying to deepen some consideration around why people should choose Skipton. And also expanding their audience as well. They have quite a traditional older audience.
‘Early on, the brand manager at Skipton filled out our Creative Futures brief — it has a bravery scale, asking “How brave are you feeling from 1 to 10?”,’ said Malam. ‘They ticked nine. I told them, “Nine’s punchy — there’s going to be work in this. Are you sure you’re up for it?” And they said, “100%”. That set the tone for the whole campaign.’
One early insight helped guide the direction: people were more likely to talk about their sex lives than their finances. ‘It’s a very British thing where it’s uncouth to talk about money — and that’s quite unique to us’, Malam added.
This insight framed the entire campaign. Skipton wanted to open up a conversation about money, one rooted in real lives. Channel 4 was the natural choice. ‘Channel 4, as a media brand, is known for having that edge in terms of how they work but that actually comes with authoritative voices — and they do that really well’, Malam explained.
‘There were good ideas from other media partners but we evaluated it with Skipton, and agreed this was where it needed to be’, he added.
Channel 4’s audience also skewed slightly older — the median viewer was 51, according to Balam — aligning perfectly with one of Skipton’s target audiences: downsizers. Skipton wanted to explore the emotionally complex decision of leaving the family home for something smaller. But the channel’s solid presence on social media allowed access to a wider demographic, too.
The heart of the campaign was a content series with real people facing real decisions, like downsizing or buying their first home. Each 12-minute episode followed them as they spent 24 hours in a prospective property before deciding whether to buy. The standout moments came from honest conversations about their finances, followed by personalised guidance from a genuine Skipton Building Society advisor. The host, Tayo Oguntonade— a former mortgage advisor who had previously worked with the Skipton group — brought further authenticity. To extend reach, articles in the Daily Mail and Metro promoted the series while offering practical financial tips and detailing how the building society could support readers.
Charlotte Beech, head of creative from EssenceMediacom, said: ‘We realised very quickly that we wouldn’t just be able to go buy a bunch of advertising off a shelf to be able to do this job. If we wanted to play into those points we talked about around authenticity and being genuine and getting the right voice across from the brand, then we’d actually have to create something bespoke.
‘So that’s where we started working, going out to media partners and landed on Channel 4 as the right one to be able to do that job and that spawned actually quite a lot of spin-offs into other channels.
‘The campaign was designed to work across different levels’, said Beech. ‘The Channel 4 series was the engaging, entertaining centrepiece. But we supported it with educational social edits, deeper financial content through This is Money and Mail Metro Media, and more on Skipton’s own site. Every touchpoint had a role.’
She added: ‘No dead ends. Everything was connected. We made sure the whole media journey was seamless and consistent.’
The campaign began as a content series hosted on Channel 4 streaming, but it quickly expanded. Promoted on linear TV, amplified across Mail Metro Media publications and even integrated into Skipton’s own branches and website, the campaign became a cross-channel movement. The entire business got behind it — from case studies to newly built site sections.
‘This campaign really showed the power of deep collaboration’, said Malam. ‘It’s easy to pass off an idea and expect someone else to run with it. But this was a shared process — us, the production house, Channel 4, Mail Metro Media, the client, even Tayo — everyone had a voice. There were no side email chains. Everyone was in the trenches together. That’s what made it work.’
‘We increased the share of competitors’ traffic in the mortgage space during the campaign, up 4%’, said Malam. ‘We’re working on our econometrics as well, so further in the coming weeks and months, we will understand from an econometric-modelled point of view the impact of the sponsorship, but… it’s looking really, really positive.’
Beech added: ‘We shifted the metric that Skipton is good value by 24%. That is a massive stat for them so that people could see the value in the service they give because that’s the core of the brand.’
In total, the three episodes have been watched more than a million times on Channel 4’s YouTube alone.
The success of the campaign adds another piece of evidence to the effectiveness of branded content. By naturally embedding the brand within appropriate content it has the effect of disarming usual audience hostility towards advertising. An ITV study last month found that campaigns from its branded content division outperformed regular TV advertising, including a 14-point boost to trust in the brand and a nine-point bump in audience consideration.
Skipton is now focused on bolstering the Founded on Fairness rebrand, it has just launched its next brand campaign which promotes the free advice it offers. With the success of Make Your Move still fresh, EssenceMediacom is now focused on deepening Skipton’s positioning even further.
‘We’ve just launched their new brand campaign, so our work now is to let that bed in for a couple of months’, Malam said. ‘That’s where our next stage begins in terms of how we deepen that new brand territory, which should hopefully lead to some more exciting stuff in the pipeline. So watch this space.’
