Santander Proves Emotion Can Move Mortgages

Opportunity

Santander saw an opportunity to make its low deposit mortgage and savings solutions more meaningful to aspiring first time buyers, at a time when getting on the property ladder felt increasingly out of reach.

Working with Publicis Flame and Biscuit Filmworks, who produced the campaign, alongside Mitre Studios, the bank set out to turn a functional offering into a more emotionally resonant story, creating a sense of hope and grounded optimism around home ownership. Moving Starts Here became the first UK articulation of Santander’s global It Starts Here platform, built around a simple commitment to help a “lost generation” get moving.

The creative challenge was significant. Santander was competing in a low-emotion, highly functional category, where consumer banking averages just 2.2 Stars on System1’s Star Rating scale. The campaign needed to make tangible product benefits, from low deposit mortgages to savings solutions, feel relevant and motivating, while building emotional connection at scale. And it had to work consistently across TV, cinema, VOD, online video, radio, OOH and social, making emotion work alongside information rather than at the expense of it.

Solution

Before the campaign went live, Santander used System1’s Test Your Ad Pro to identify where the creative could work harder emotionally and optimise it before launch.

The first round showed a strong foundation for the brand, but clear opportunities to build emotional impact. System1’s second-by-second emotional FaceTrace™ remained relatively flat and Star Rating landed around the category average, while Fast Fluency was lower than expected. Because slower fluency can create confusion and neutral feeling early in an ad, this was reflected in a weak Spike Rating, signalling a risk that the creative would not generate enough active interest in Santander’s mortgage offer.

Crucially, Test Your Ad Pro showed the team where the creative was losing momentum. Scene-by-scene analysis revealed that branding did not become clear until 15 seconds, while some of the more emotional moments were failing to land. This gave Santander a clear optimisation roadmap.

Having worked with System1 for eight years, the Santander team had a strong foundation of creative effectiveness knowledge to draw on. The solution was simple: bring the music in earlier and move the branding up front, so emotional cues could work harder from the very beginning.

This was particularly important given the established Ant & Dec and Santander relationship. Bringing the brand into the ad earlier allowed viewers to immediately connect the duo’s familiar warmth and likeability with Santander, creating an emotional shortcut between celebrity and brand from the opening moments. Rather than building that connection halfway through, the creative could draw on years of consistent association from the outset, allowing emotional resonance to compound throughout the ad.

Results

Ahead of launch, the team acted on the testing insight, bringing music into the edit earlier and introducing Santander branding within the first two seconds.

The final creative was then captured through System1’s Competitive Edge, which tests every ad that goes live to air in the UK, providing a real-time performance benchmark.

The impact was clear. Star Rating rose to 3.9, well above the 2.2 category average, while Spike Rating moved from weak to strong. Fluency Rating, which measures overall brand recognition, held stable, showing that the gains in emotion and activation came without compromising brand recall.

And creative impact translated into commercial results. Total mortgage applications amongst First Time Buyers (across all channels) increased by 34% during the nine-week campaign period versus Q1 2026. This uplift came from a combination of improved FTB pricing and the campaign, which worked in parallel to drive momentum.

“Getting a mortgage is a big, emotional step, so we wanted the campaign to feel as motivating as the offer itself. System1 testing gave us confidence that we were landing the message we intended, while showing us where we could make the creative work harder. Those insights helped us sharpen the ad before launch and build more emotion without losing the clarity of the mortgage proposition.” – Jake Dowling, Marketing Effectiveness Manager at Santander.