What If Zambezi and LPL Financial Could…Win a Shorty Award?

LPL Financial’s first consumer-facing campaign in its 36-year history out of Zambezi, “What If You Could?”, is a Shorty Awards finalist in the Financial Services category!

The campaign challenged the financial category with a market leader's mindset. For over three decades, the brand has been at the center of a rapidly evolving wealth management landscape with more sophisticated solutions, innovative services, and complex dynamics that made wealth management equally challenging and opportunistic. 

Our two target audiences—financial advisors and investors—also have big aspirations, but face tight restrictions from standardized systems that limit flexibility and constrain innovation. Both audiences share a powerful ambition: to build wealth with purpose and shape the future on their own terms. Talented professionals have bold goals, but often find themselves boxed in. Investors have complex needs, but receive templated solutions. The promise of opportunity is there—but the freedom to pursue it fully is not. LPL changed that equation. 

To really flip the financial services script, in offerings and marketing, LPL and Zambezi both knew they had quite the first impression to make. The financial services category was full of ad campaigns featuring retirees living their best financially secure lives, which is both expected and safe…and, in our opinion, pretty overdone.  So we flipped the script with a 360 campaign featuring Oscar-nominated actress Anna Kendrick to provoke ambition and practical aspiration—and curiosity—in a brand serving 8 million American customers. 

In her effortlessly charming way, Kendrick gives new life to the sentiment “the grass is greener,” demonstrating that even a well-worn metaphor and well-worn advertising vertical can be reborn. And audiences sat up and paid attention: with an initial goal of 5-7% brand lift, we saw the strongest lift to date in aided awareness at +31%, followed by favorability showing (+13 points) lift--both far and away above the initial targets. 

In just the first month, the campaign drove ~60k website visits, with pages per visit up 12.5% compared to non-campaign visitors (1.79 vs 1.59). Google Paid Search is driving the most traffic and has shown the most favorable ROI ratio. Across all channels, net impressions in the first month exceeded ~73MM, and total impressions for 2025 came in at 209MM with 38.4MM video views. Fighting stagnant expectations within the sector more than worked; it rewrote the playbook of financial services marketing.

View “What If You Could?” here and vote (with an account) here!