Why this fintech marketer is betting on trust over attention

Kasia Leyden, CMO of Acorns, the fintech company specializing in micro-investing and personal finance, is set to speak at the upcoming Marketing Brew Summit on September 30. Ahead of the event, we caught up with her to hear why she thinks marketers are chasing the wrong metric, and what it takes to build a brand people actually come back to.

What do you think most marketers get wrong in their advertising today?

They’re optimizing for attention when they should be optimizing for trust. Those aren’t the same thing…The whole internet is an engine designed to get people to spend money, bet money, or panic into action. That’s great if your goal is clicks. It’s terrible if your goal is building a brand people come back to.

The brands that win the next decade won’t be the ones who interrupt people best. They’ll be the ones who leave people feeling smarter than they were 30 seconds earlier.

Where do you see the biggest gap between how marketers think audiences behave and how they actually behave?

Marketers think consumers are making decisions. Most consumers are actually managing emotions. People don’t buy because they’ve completed a rational evaluation. They buy because something reduced uncertainty, created hope, relieved guilt, or made them feel like the future might look a little better.

You’ve built Acorns marketing around warmth and education. What’s a bet you made that the data said was wrong, and how did it turn out?

Everyone in fintech optimizes for urgency. We deliberately optimized for optimism. Fear converts faster. Hope compounds longer.

So we built “Show Your Potential” around real customers, real compound growth, real “aha” moments. No polished testimonials. No scary stats. The Acorns Sportsbook activation during the Super Bowl is the clearest example of how that bet plays out in practice. We showed up at the biggest cultural moment of the year with one simple idea: bet on the game, or bet on yourself.

Five years from now, what’s the marketing “best practice” of today that you think we’ll all look back on and cringe at?

We’ve confused engagement with usefulness. Right now the algorithm rewards get-rich-quick, spend-more, YOLO financial behavior, and a lot of brands and creators are feeding it because it performs. Persuasion got completely separated from truth [and] from anything actually useful. Audiences are already tuning it out.

The brands that built their playbooks on top of that moment are going to have a real reckoning. Credibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the only thing that survives a trust collapse.

Name one brand or organization that’s putting out advertising you’re regularly jealous of. What makes it so good?

Wimbledon’s “Overheard at Wimbledon” campaign this year was so fresh. They did something deceptively simple: they observed what was actually happening in the stands—the whispers, the celebrity-spotting, the trying-to-figure-out-what-everyone-is-saying—and made that the creative. In a sport defined by silence, they leaned into the noise. The result was content that made everyone on social feel like they were right there, even if they weren’t.

That’s the insight. You don’t have to manufacture a cultural moment if you’re paying close enough attention to the one that already exists…The best advertising doesn’t create culture. It notices culture before everyone else does.

The summit’s themes are “insights, intuition, and integration.” Which of those three is the most underrated right now—and which one are marketers leaning on too much?

The best marketing decisions usually feel obvious in hindsight and impossible to justify beforehand. That’s intuition. Data explains yesterday. Intuition invents tomorrow. The best things we’ve built at Acorns—like Money Therapy, the show about bad money habits—didn’t come from a data brief. It came from knowing that people feel shame about their money decisions but have no idea where to start in fixing them.

What’s overused is what people call insights but is really just information with a spotlight on it. A stat from a trend report isn’t an insight. An insight reframes how you see your customer and changes what you actually do.