Brands I Noticed: Revolut, Cardigans and Consumerism
Advertising analysis from our special guest series.
Revolut’s new ad is beautiful in every way. It’s artistic, it’s cinematic, it’s sonically and visually stunning—but is it a lie?
I have never been particularly interested in money.
I wanted to make it, sure, I love beautiful things, travelling to new places, enjoying interesting food and so on, but each time somebody tried to explain the ins and outs of saving, investing, credit scores and the like it was all of about five minutes before I tuned them out—after all, these topics felt pretty much inconsequential to me at fifteen or sixteen years old, the ages at which I was most frequently subjected to such lessons.
However, I’m now nearing twenty-one, stumbling my way through life (and, as you, my unfortunate reader, will soon see, across my keyboard) and I am inescapably aware of how critical financial awareness in young people is—which brings me to to this episode’s advertising spot: Revolut.
Upon its first intrusion into whatever my chosen detective show happened to be that week, Revolut’s appeal to the broke twenty-somethings of the world struck me as something different. This appeal does not stand alone, being just one of a mass of neo-digital banks climbing the wreckage of the 2008 financial collapse, clearing the rubble and springing onto the scene through the early to mid 2010s. Having emerged beside banks like Monzo, Starling and Chime, collectively making up only about 5% of the market, Revolut certainly doesn’t stand alone, but it does stand out.
With the economy pushing so hard against young people (the 2025 Youth Index reporting a staggering 60% of 15-25 year olds fearing they will never be in a financial position to support a family or own a home), who wouldn’t feel their ears perk up at such a such a tagline as Money Possibilities in Your Pocket.
The Advert
It goes something like this:
We see a young woman, beautiful, but not in any uncanny, vogue sort of way—she’s beautiful like your best friend, like the girl next to you in your 9am bio-med lecture, all bundled up in her pilling, dusky pinkish-blue cardigan.
She’s conscientious, she goes to her lectures. (I do not).
She has mid-length brown hair, seemingly tossed backward by the blast of a car racing past her. It blares its horn, but doesn’t startle her in the slightest as she navigates the busy pavement.
She has somewhere to be, she is her own force of nature.
The frames move quicker still, there’s only a flash of the gentleman noticing her as she flies into a coffee shop. He’s middle-aged, wearing a diagonally striped tie, and, though he’s barely in frame for a full second, his money is plain in every detail of his expensive brevity. He is a figure of surprising intrigue, the plain businessman with his window seat, and I am inclined to suggest that there may be an allegorical dimension to his character—he’s the pale face of old-money, old-banking, the redundant space between Nationwide, Dominic West’s agile reverse-psychology, and Revolut’s anonymous, cardigan-wearing heroine.
He notices her, but she doesn’t notice him.
She joins a queue that’s moving faster than any real London coffee-shop line has ever moved, and utters two unladylike monosyllables—“Latte, please”. She’s unlearning her pre-programmed, polite, feminine chirpiness–the forty-something businessman in his unimaginative tie would probably have found her rude. The camera looks up at her, then down again, and she reaches into her cardigan pocket to pay.
She fumbles, reaches further, and then everything changes.
Reality is suspended.
The young woman squeals like a child as she burrows through her own pocket, crosses an invisible threshold and lands in a giant cardigan-cave to the gentle sway of Ben Crosland’s ‘The Hourglass’. The floor, the ceiling, everything is encased in the dusky threads, ebbing back and forth in soft woollen-waves.
Our narrator describes how “down here, you can see the bigger picture”, and just like that her passions, experiences, and the expenses associated with them all float before her, rather than hanging over her—with Revolut’s implicit gift of financial perspective, she is set free from all that pressure. Each item then suddenly comes to life, zooming past her through another wooly tunnel—her electric keyboard, her boxing gloves, her bedside lamp—and again she cries out in excitement and dives straight in after them, delving deeper into this warren of dust-tones and yarn.
(I had a little laugh to myself at the columns of coffee cups and wine glasses, and their strangeness against the knitted backdrop. That’s my kind of spending and, now that I think about it, my kind of sweater).
We were taught that money is something serious, something burdensome and heavy, and yet this determined twenty-something year-old is exploring it as if on an adventure, within the safety of make-believe. She’s enjoying herself, she’s playing, and beaming at her potential like a little girl at a dinosaur exhibit (or at least for me it was dinosaurs).
Her joy seems to suggest to us something extraordinary—that perhaps it isn’t all as scary as it seems.
The businessman by the door would probably have scoffed at that, mockery proving a poor disguise for anxiety as he realises how easily he’d fit in, just another fossil amongst the dinosaurs and belemnites—though, let’s be honest, he’s not half as interesting as a pterodactyl.
Then everything begins moving again, she’s launched to the top of the wooly mountains, and it’s from there that this dream-state of sorts begins to diffuse, and she approaches real life once more. As the woollen world shrinks smaller and smaller, we watch each piece click seamlessly together into a crisp, black rounded Revolut card. It’s slotted into the young woman’s pocket beside what I’ve presumptively decided are her house-keys, perhaps an intentional nod to the likeness between the objects in their power to unlock, or it may be simply an exciting coincidence—but, in advertising, I am doubtful that anything is ever much of a coincidence.
In that moment, everything is at this imaginative young-woman’s fingertips—her money, and with it a world of possibilities, and her keys, a set of carefully cut metal which everyday grant access to a place that is perfectly her own—home, shabby rental though it may be (and, in this economy, almost certainly is). In that moment, I don’t care that I’ve given myself over to manipulation of marketing teams and their beautiful, but likely hollow promises. She has everything I want.
As she leaves the coffee shop, she doesn’t rush. She passes a gorgeous bar area with a shallow arcade-styled backing of soft brown wood. Before there was no time to notice such details, the architecture was nothing more than a backdrop, a blur, but now the world is slower, slower because her’s can afford to be, and it seems to me that this is what Revolut promises us—the space to be a child, to dive between the stitches of our cosiest knitwear and order our favourite cup of coffee before making our way home, the ability to buy our own peace, our own playtime.
This is a beautiful concept, of course it is, the opportunity for nurturing our inner-children in such an unlikely place as banking. But, in appreciating and poeticising Revolut’s promise, we must also hold space for sharper dissection and critique, and ask the uncomfortable question—to what extent are they pulling the wool over our eyes (you have my boss to thank for the pun) both literally and figuratively?
In searching out an answer for you, my reader, I am reminded that our analysis thus far has been in something of a vacuum, and it would surely go amiss not to examine Revolut, and the story it tells (or perhaps sells) us, against its similarly successful peers.
Neo-Banks (“hot coral”, un-cardigained)
The most striking of these in the UK has been Monzo, whose salmon card (for those with the inside track, its official colour is called “hot coral”) flits in and out of clients’ wallets with a distinctive neon gleam, something of a beacon of brand identity.
I began banking with Monzo when I was about seventeen, and did so for no better reason than that it was my mother’s preferred bank, I’d seen how simple it was to set up, and I wanted an account where my parents couldn’t track my money or what I was spending it on—ease and stealth was all I required as a teenager, albeit a pretty lonely one without a great deal to hide. Monzo has worked well for me since, and recently I even upgraded to Perks for the higher interest rate.
Admittedly, I mostly did this to fool myself into believing that I had some tangible degree of financial control over myself, my life, and my future, this subscription proving more a symptom of my own desperation for independence than Monzo’s particular advertising proficiency or product supremacy, but I digress.
All this is to say that, despite my present loyalty to Monzo, I am doubtful that I would have been half as seduced by their marketing, had I been looking, as I have been by Revolut’s—not to the point of jumping ship, but perhaps to dipping a toe, a foot, an ankle into the water and sketching the ripples as I notice them. And, as you can see, notice them I did, because Revolut presented to me something worth noticing.
But how realistic is Revolut’s story, really?
The Analysis
It seems to me that we can look at this advert in several different ways:
As a piece of artwork, beautifully shot, edited and written, a gorgeously imaginative rendering of childlike joy within the financial sphere
As a complex operation of psychological profiling, identifying what young people are struggling with financially (beside simply having some finances to struggle with) and exploiting the harsh, cold reputation of traditional banks as a means of carving out market space for a more-attractive alternative
As a manipulative ploy, enticing young people with the promise of security and the means to be adventurous and carefree when all they can really tangibly provide is banking, interest, investing, and other relatively standard financial services—essentially, a lie.
My conclusion, which I doubt comes as any surprise, is that the truth falls somewhere between the three.
Is this advert beautiful to look at, to listen to and consume? Absolutely, and as a writer and musician myself this is mainly what drew me to it. Is it still an advert, inherently a means by which businesses seek to self-promote or outsource promotion to others such as via sponsorships and make money? Also yes. Does it really have some extraordinary power to provide financial security and thus re-ignite imaginative practice for its financially struggling clients? No, not in such a literal sense.
But does this make it all a lie?
I don’t think so, and here’s why.
Revolut does not present itself as a means of guaranteed financial prosperity, success, or acquisition of wealth, though it is worth mentioning that this is absolutely the position it speaks from—the business reported a staggering $1bn in profit pre-tax for 2024, profits now amounting to more than triple their total net losses and outperforming both Monzo and Starling.
(Revolut’s cardigan would probably be Ladakhi Cashmere).
However, from a branding point of view, Revolut’s emphasis is on the services it provides, and the potential growth/management of ones' money when handled well (and, implicitly, by Revolut). It invites us to ‘imagine a place for [our] money where [we’re] in control’, and leads us to wonder what ‘extraordinary things’ our money could do for us if we didn’t allow it to ‘sit idle’ (implicitly with another bank). Revolut’s emphasis is on what could happen, on the ‘possibilit[ies] in your pocket’, and confidently markets to us the imaginative, the playful, with a spin of the literally impossible but undeniably tantalising.
Simply put, Revolut is conscious of its own absurdity, and plays into it! And is one of the biggest reasons that I love this advert–it’s elegant, it’s bizarre, and fusions like that are very much my thing. I just probably need to work on making some real money before overthinking where to put it, but, if I do ever wrangle my way into a real, grown-up paycheck, Revolut is absolutely on my radar now.
And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what advertising is all about?
This is what I noticed, and I hope you find yourself with a quiet moment today to notice something too.