By turning AI’s blind spots into the creative idea, the financial data company explains why domain fluency has become the real differentiator in enterprise tech.
Walk through Wall Street station right now and you’ll see something oddly refreshing for a campaign about artificial intelligence. In it, bears push grocery carts, executives puzzle over literal hedges and financial jargon is taken painfully and hilariously at face value.
The work comes from FactSet, with creative by VSA Partners, and it lands with a simple line that does more than most AI slogans manage in an entire paragraph: ‘Get a partner that is fluent in finance.’
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The campaign, ‘Fluent in Finance,’ grew out of firsthand experience with how AI behaves in real use. “We thought about our own experiences with AI and how the technology often gets very specific, very random details wrong, or misinterprets words and context altogether,” said Kim Mickenberg, partner of campaign design at VSA Partners.
That observation became the creative foundation for the work. “The thing about finance is that it has a language all its own, with ‘liquidity’ that isn’t wet, ‘bears’ and ‘bulls’ that aren’t real animals, ‘hedges’ that aren’t plants and countless other terms of art that industry professionals use every day,” Mickenberg added. “If AI struggles to understand the language and the nuance, it can’t deliver exactly what financial institutions need.”
Mickenberg describes the campaign as a continuation of FactSet’s earlier brand work rather than a reset. “We see ‘Fluent in Finance’ as a spiritual successor to ‘Not Just the Facts,’ the campaign we developed and launched with FactSet in 2023,” she said.
“We wanted to tell a story about FactSet’s industry leadership in the age of AI and underscore the fact that FactSet is coming at this technology in a uniquely thoughtful, responsible way. We also wanted to stay true to the brand’s ethos and lean into the warmth, humor and humanity that made the first campaign so effective.
“The out-of-home is just one part of a larger campaign, but for the out-of-home specifically, using AI to critique AI made perfect sense.”
Pointing to the universality of the experience, she said: “Everyone who has ever prompted AI has gotten something wildly unexpected that didn’t align with their intended vision at all.” The ads pair finance terms with AI-generated imagery that misinterprets them.
At its core, the campaign makes a clear claim about where value comes from. “Ultimately, we are making a strong and simple point. AI-powered solutions are only as good as the human expertise behind them.”
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