Happy Year in Monzo week! Nothing brings us more joy than roasting and celebrating millions of people for their spending habits, so we’re here to break down exactly how we did it.
Running a campaign at this scale is a group effort. Data, engineering, design and writing work together to create a seamless, personalised story for every customer. And the words are especially important because there’s a lot of them. So, so many. And every single one of them counts towards building a delightful, personalised experience for someone.
We’ve been running Year in Monzo (or Monzo Wrapped, if we’re going by its street name) since 2018, and it’s evolved significantly over the last six years. The very first version we rolled out was a much more basic review of a few spending categories, and people loved it! It gave us a solid foundation that we knew people would be excited about each year, but we also wanted to do more than just a few spending categories, and a few one liners.
We know people’s financial lives tell a much richer story than just a series of transactions in a bank account. That’s why we wanted to capture the essence of the year through an overarching creative theme, then apply that to each customer’s individual experience, for an altogether magical experience.
Introducing: MOOD
We start thinking about our creative concept way before the year is fully cooked, looking at all the iconic cultural moments that have happened so far. Nothing is off the table at this stage, and we cast our net wide. The more material we have at this point the better, because it helps us hone in on recurring themes or trends that feel relevant to us and our customers. Doing this brings together how we write and design the experience, and creates consistency we carry through every channel. That turns the individual experience into a national conversation, which helps amplify the whole campaign.
Luckily, it’s been a wild rollercoaster of a year, so we’ve had plenty of inspiration to work from. And everywhere we looked, we saw highs, lows, and these iconic contrasting moments, that tied in nicely to the Money vs Monzo brand campaign we launched earlier this year.
It felt like these contrasts really captured the spicy, silly, wild, iconic moments that made 2024 feel like a whole entire mood. Or really, a thousand moods, jam-packed into 12 months. So we settled on our theme: MOOD. We wanted the experience in the app itself to be an homage to this chaotic, euphoric vibe in a real way, beyond just dropping mentions of iconic moments into copy. So we narrowed down our favourite ideas to two that we felt really brought the concept to life:
A mood picker that tells the story of each customer’s year in two entirely different ways, so you can choose to experience your year in nice or savage mode depending on your mood.
A finale screen that defines your 'mood' for the year.
That’s where the writing part comes in.
This year, we wrote over 2,000 individual lines of copy for two completely different in-app experiences.
And both were written by a team of flesh and blood humans! Usually, Year in Monzo’s the work of one writer pairing up with the social team, but because we decided to build the mood picker, the workload was doubled – so, for the first time ever, we were a team of three.
As ever, we started with the ‘skeleton’ of the core experience, because it has to bring the creative concept to life. That’s the screens everyone sees, no matter what their individual data points are.
The skeleton has an important job to do. It needs to bring the punchy energy of the core concept to life, while actually guiding people through the experience. We started with intro screens that felt relatively neutral but punchy, so that when you selected either ‘nice’ or ‘savage’ mode you’d immediately feel the difference. We tied in some of those iconic contrasting images and the language of ‘mood’ into the intro to seed the concept early on.
Then the fun, exciting, shiny new part. We had about 40 different options for our two Year in Monzo ‘modes’, and here are some of the ideas we eventually shelved:
Year in Monzo is usually all about finding the exact balance in our tone of voice, but the two modes allowed us to push it as far as it can go on the roastier side, while also giving people the option to just get hyped up and experience the kind element too.
When it came to setting the tone for each mode, we found that exploring different names for the two modes actually helped hone in on how exactly we’d execute them. We ended up using ‘kindly relative’ versus ‘mean older sibling’ as useful guardrails throughout the writing process.
We didn’t want nice mode to feel boring, or savage mode to feel mean in an unfunny way. So we leaned into hyping up our customers, observational humour and puns for nice mode. And by having people specifically opt in to savage mode, we had their permission to lean into a spicier tone with a little more edge. Having both really freed us to go wild on both ends of the tonal spectrum (even though some savage lines were definitely way too harsh to see the light of day).
We sprinkled magic throughout, with “quips” for the UK’s biggest merchants
When we tell you your top merchant for each spending carry, we pair it with one liners, or quips. We wanted each quip to not just be fun, but also be funny, no matter which mode you chose! So we got started.
Of course, we couldn’t write a quip for every single merchant on the planet – there’s simply too many. So we wrote a quip in nice and savage mode for the 150 most popular merchants in the UK. We started by splitting up the merchants between 3 writers (Hit, Emily and me, Maja) and then came together to share, finesse and brainstorm.
Were they funny enough? Punny enough? Savage enough? We mastered ‘the art of the swap’ when we ran out of creative juice, drawing on ideas we had for other merchants, moving quips into finale screens, and recycling ones that ended up on the cutting room floor last year. The process involved lots of surreal debates and long, long meetings – like whether or not making an aircon joke for OnlyFans actually tracked.
We tend to over-index on puns for merchants we don’t personally use, which are always fun but have diminishing returns. So we started exploring more observational angles – what are the jokes that only people who shop at Uniqlo would get? We crowdsourced ones that we didn’t have covered in the team – shoutout to our colleagues for helping with quips for Max Spielmann and Turtle Bay.
Each quip went through various rounds of checks and approvals. We sense-checked them with ourselves for clarity, with others for humour and relatability, with our friends in Legal for “not getting us in trouble”-ability, and with anyone else that would look at them. This means even the 300 quips we ended up with is more like 900 in total, given the amount of rewriting. Pour one out for “Ah, a fellow ‘Stoner.” – an early rejected quip for Waterstones.
And for the finale, a whole entire MOOD
The whole thing culminates in us summing up your mood for the year, and we had about 80 moods in total (but double that, have we mentioned we had a mood picker this year?). Most of the moods were made up of more than one data point to paint a more vivid picture of your year, and inspired by the starter pack memes of social. So rather than just being a fan of Netflix, we brought together streaming and takeaway data to tell a more interesting story.
We used stickers and imagery that felt really inspired by the starter pack aesthetic of memes, and the stickers actually changed depending on the tone for each mood, to add one final flourish.
We do this to ourselves and to all of you every year for a reason. We love to watch you love, hate, or love to hate your Year in Monzo – so please keep the reactions coming!