Fintech spent most of the last decade trying to look like Silicon Valley. Chime just spent the 2025 holiday season looking like America.
The company launched "Bank Smarter This Season" on October 22, 2025 — its first holiday campaign ever — with Jason Momoa playing a rotating cast of everyday characters: a mall cop, a balding mattress salesman, a New York bodega clerk, a coffee barista, a building doorman. The creative came from Mojo Supermarket. A second spot, "New Day," followed on December 22.
The results, as reported by Adweek: a 15-point lift in brand consideration and a 20-plus-point lift across key brand equity attributes. Website visits climbed. New enrollments from the creative exceeded every prior brand push Chime had run.
What Makes This a PR Case Study, Not Just an Ad Case Study
The celebrity booking is the least interesting part. The interesting part is the positioning.
Chime didn't use Momoa to look cool. They used him to look like a regular person. CMO Vineet Mehra has talked publicly about the campaign being rooted in everyday progress — not aspiration, not hustle culture. That positioning is a direct shot at legacy banks and a direct embrace of Chime's actual customer: younger, lower-to-middle-income, mobile-first, fee-sensitive.
For PR teams, that's the real lesson. Celebrity partnerships only work when the celebrity is a vehicle for the brand's truth, not a mask for it. Momoa's on-set improv reportedly drove a lot of the final creative — which is only useful because he was cast to play people, not himself.
Three Things PR Pros Should Take From This
1. Segment your spokesperson the way you segment your audience. Momoa wasn't picked because he's famous. He was picked because he reads as an everyman at scale.
2. Serialize the creative. The October spot and the December spot aren't two ads — they're chapters. Serialized storytelling keeps earned media covering the brand across weeks, not just launch day.
3. Ladder every celebrity campaign back to a product feature. Each Chime spot pointed at specific tools: fee-free banking, cash back, overdraft protection. That's the difference between a vanity campaign and a revenue campaign.
The Bigger Pattern
Legacy banks still run campaigns about "relationships" and "trust." Challenger banks are running campaigns about friction — specifically, the friction their incumbents create. Chime turned Momoa into a human highlight reel of everything broken about the old banking experience. That's a PR strategy disguised as an ad campaign.
If you're doing fintech communications in 2026, the template is sitting right here. Pick a spokesperson who disappears into your customer. Pick a villain (legacy friction) that everyone recognizes. Tie every creative beat to a product benefit you can actually prove. Then serialize it.
That's how you get from a celebrity announcement to a 15-point consideration lift. For a contrast on how a competing fintech used a very different casting strategy — hiring a director instead of a star — see our breakdown of Cash App's "Cash In" campaign with Ramy Youssef. And for a B2B fintech variant that pre-stages news rather than chasing it, see Airwallex's McLaren F1 takeover.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
