Lending Startup Ads Feature Blockchain Character To Highlight Business

Figure Technologies ad campaign

A new video ad campaign by Figure Technologies has “Blockchain,” the character explaining the eponymous technology, according to published reports Tuesday (Feb. 11).

The ad is aimed at helping viewers understand what Figure does. The startup uses a lending process based on blockchain — a bookkeeping network ran by computers. If people understand it, Figure hopes they may be more inclined to use Figure’s services.

Chief marketing officer Brad Simmons told Reuters the time is now to educate consumers, but he didn’t disclose how much had been spent on the ads. The ads will play on broadcast and television.

In the ad, Blockchain is a puppet made a set of four gray blocks. His personality is one of a young salesman, and in the ad, he wants to tell just about anyone who will listen how great blockchain is, interacting with a bearded man trying to eat lunch and a couple applying for a home loan. In one scene in the ad, set in a bank, Blockchain’s mascot disparages the bank as being “old.”

Figure was launched in 2018 by CEO and Co-founder Mike Cagney, as a way to help people with home finance loans and promised to speed up the processes of blockchain. The process is touted as superior to old traditional lenders.

The ads are intended to aim at people who don’t know or understand blockchain, and the titular character says that many “don’t know what he does.”

Cagney’s previous venture, Social Finance, grew quickly during the Great Recession by refinancing loans for graduating students who were strapped for cash.