Announcing: These companies are the winners of Tearsheet’s 2025 Marketing Awards

Tearsheet’s Marketing Awards are the financial industry’s top awards program focused on marketing, customer acquisition, branding, and growth. This generation’s financial services and fintech companies are deeply focused on achieving scale, one customer at a time.

The Marketing Awards are intended to identify and celebrate the best customer-facing work in financial services.

Campaign of the Year: April’s Dream Big, Sleep Easy campaign at Money 20/20

In a sea of forgettable fintech marketing at Money 20/20 USA, April’s “Dream Big, Sleep Easy” campaign stood out as the clear winner of Tearsheet’s 2025 Campaign of the Year. While competitors burned through marketing budgets on predictable sponsorships and logo placements, April cleverly tapped into the conference’s notorious sleep-deprived culture with a campaign that was equal parts strategic and refreshing. Building on their 2023 success, April distributed Sleep Kits to attendees’ hotel rooms featuring “Dream of Deposits” sleep masks, “Weapon of Mass Deductions” laptop stickers, and sleep affirmation cards that brilliantly reframed tax season as a growth opportunity rather than a headache.

The creativity continued poolside at “The Dream Zone” cabana, where April created an oasis of calm amid conference chaos that served as both meeting space and living demonstration of their core message: embed April and you can literally rest easy while unlocking tax season’s full potential. The results? Organic social buzz that money can’t buy, with attendees voluntarily becoming brand ambassadors by sharing photos in their April sleep masks across the event, and more importantl, over 100 high-value partnership conversations in just 72 hours.

Best product marketing: Citi and Movable Ink

In an era where generic marketing emails typically land with a thud in consumers’ inboxes, Citi has reinvented the wheel with its transformed Merchant Offers program, earning Tearsheet’s 2025 Best Product Marketing Award with its partner, Movable Ink. While competitors continue bombarding customers with the same tired offers regardless of shopping habits, Citi saw an opportunity in personalization as a revenue-driving strategy that actually works. The results: offer activations have multiplied significantly year-over-year, with enhanced personalization elements driving substantial increases in customer engagement.

What sets this campaign apart is the fusion of data science and creative execution. By tapping into Movable Ink’s dynamic rendering capabilities and connecting to their offers API, Citi generates millions of content variations tailored to individual shopping behaviors, local offers, dining preferences, and even savings earned to date—all delivered at the precise moment of email open. This extends a standard A/B test or basic segmentation; it’s real-time, hyper-relevant marketing that can remake mundane offer emails into personalized shopping experiences.

Best product/service designed for Gen Z: Persado

In the race to capture Gen Z’s attention and wallets, Persado won Tearsheet’s 2025 Best Product/Service Designed for Gen Z award with its groundbreaking Motivation AI platform. While most financial institutions continue struggling with cringe-worthy attempts to sound “lit” or “based,” Persado has cracked the code on authentic Gen Z communication through sophisticated AI that doesn’t just mimic Gen Z speak — it understands what motivates this digitally native, values-driven demographic. Drawing on a trove of performance data from 8 of the top 10 U.S. banks and over 17 billion customer interactions, Persado’s platform delivers personalized, emotionally resonant messages that don’t set off Gen Z’s finely-tuned BS detectors.

The proof is in the numbers. Financial brands using Persado’s platform are seeing 40% average increases in conversion rates, with industry titans like NatWest, JPMorgan Chase, Ally, and SoFi collectively generating over billions of dollars in incremental revenue. In a generation where 45% of consumers would switch banks for more personalized experiences, Persado is helping financial institutions survive in an era where authentic connection can be the difference between relevance and just being an afterthought.