Real Traders Know LYNX

UX/UI Design

The problem

Investing got easy. App-first brokers spent the last five years teaching the Netherlands that trading is one swipe away, and category advertising followed: low fees, fast onboarding, friendly onboarding bonuses. LYNX sells something else. Professional tooling, global market access, execution for people who take position sizing seriously.

So the brief was not “explain the product.” It was: claim a mindset that the discount brokers cannot credibly claim, at a spend level well below theirs.

We overshot our goals in increasing aided brand awareness in the Netherlands.

LYNX 360° brand campaign, Netherlands, flight 1 (March to May 2026)

Role

Creative Brand Specialist, LYNX (client side)

In collaboration with

Lemon Scented Tea
Brandwebbing

The idea

Ordinary people see events. Real traders see implications.

The film shows news the whole country recognises (a blocked Suez Canal, an election night, an AI boom) and then shows what a trader actually reads in it. The endline lands on recognition rather than persuasion: Real traders know. LYNX.

Why this route rather than a fee or feature message. For three reason:

Fee messaging is unownable. Every broker in the category is running some version of it, and the cheapest player wins that argument by definition. LYNX is not the cheapest player.

The mindset is provable. LYNX customers do behave differently, and the concept lets us say so without claiming returns, which compliance would never clear anyway.

It scales past the film. “Implications” is a content engine, not a one-off script. It connects to the FD, IEX, Quote and BNR context we already buy into.

The media plan mirrored the split: financial titles and BNR to earn credibility with people who already trade, plus addressable TV, cinema, out-of-home, social and YouTube to build the memory structure with everyone else. Roughly a 60/40 weighting toward broad brand building over targeted, in line with the Binet and Field benchmark for financial services.

Out-of-home-creative on display in Amsterdam

What I did

I owned the brand side of the work rather than the concept. Concretely:

I wrote and defended the brand brief, including the decision to keep the campaign in the serious, low-saturation register rather than the bright, friendly category default. Distinctiveness in this category is available in tone, not in colour.

I ran creative review across the flight, from script to end card to the 6-second cutdowns, and pushed for scene-level clarity where the visuals were drifting away from the voice-over.

I brought compliance into the design process instead of after it. The title-driven concept collided with rules on risk-warning prominence, and the practical output was a set of typographic rules for what “predominant” means at each format size.

I directed the format translation for display, out-of-home and social, where the film’s pacing and palette do not survive intact, and set up in-house adaptation so LYNX designers can rework weak scenes for later flights instead of re-briefing production.

I built the effectiveness readout: campaign study, media results and creative critique in one retrospective, presented to the agency and internal stakeholders in June.

The film was made with AI-generated imagery, directed and prompted by Arthur Mebius with retouching by Jan Daniel Wolters. This is worth naming because it changed the review process. Instead of approving a shoot, we were approving a probability distribution of shots, and the failure mode shifted from “wrong take” to “uncanny detail.”

Print creative in Dutch Financial Times (FD)

Results

Aided awareness increased considerably (can’t disclose how much, under NDA). One in three people recalled the campaign, against seven competitors with higher ad pressure.

Among people who saw the campaign versus those who did not: awareness, openness, consideration and brand strength increased significantly.

Emotional image improved on 7 of 13 attributes year on year and declined on one.