Role: Senior Art Director
Agency: R/GA New York + Sydney
Client: Ally Bank

The Challenge

Ally Financial is an American challenger bank that’s 100% online, which means your money works smarter, not harder. But in a landscape dominated by big competitors with billions of dollars in annual marketing spend, less than 8% of America’s deposits are held by online banks. Ally needed to prove they could make Americans’ money work smarter, in a way that would cut through online.

The Solution

We helped Ally Bank become the world’s first bank to officially accept Reddit Gold. The Ally r/Bank was a promoted post that allowed Redditors to deposit their Gold and then used a savvy little hack to give them a highly-coveted Argentium award (worth more than 40x Gold) in return for their investment.

The Result

In just 72 hours, the Ally r/Bank traded its entire stockpile of Argentium, became the most Gold-awarded promoted post in Reddit’s entire history (and the most Gold-awarded post outright on Reddit in all of 2020), and introduced the front page of the internet to Ally’s smarter banking. Notoriously allergic to brand involvement and advertising, Redditors were suddenly hailing the Ally r/Bank as “Reddit Coin Jesus”, “marketing genius”, and “the best trade deal in history”.