Plaid adds $382k in pipeline with TLDR campaign — their best direct buy yet
- Drive measurable ROI by generating pipeline—not just awareness
- Reach incremental audiences while maintaining alignment with core target audience
- Achieved best-performing direct buy to date, adding $382k in pipeline, earning 70 leads, and achieving 20.1x ROI
- Leads generated included both net-new and upsell opportunities
About Plaid
Great products lose momentum when financial access gets complex. Plaid fixes that. Plaid is a financial network that serves as the analytics layer for financial services. Plaid’s data analytics solutions deliver faster, safer onboarding, credit decisioning, payments, and anti-fraud. Plaid works with thousands of companies, including fintechs, Fortune 500 companies, and many of the largest banks to empower people with more choice and control over how they manage their money. Fintechs like Robinhood, Venmo, and Chime use Plaid to streamline onboarding, reduce drop-off, and build financial products that scale.
Plaid is a financial network that goes beyond just connecting accounts or modernizing payments. Plaid combines deep data insights, bank-grade connectivity, and cutting edge fraud detection tools to empower developers and financial institutions to create the safest, most innovative experiences for their users. Plaid’s most recent launches include Plaid Protect, where businesses can proactively combat fraud by leveraging real time insights from the Plaid network, and the Plaid Credit suite used by lenders and partners to enable smarter, fairer, and more accurate credit decisions.
Limited budget, pressure to perform, and the search for audience fit
When Simone Schnarwiler was tasked with scaling the direct buys program at Plaid, she was given clear direction: prioritize publishers that perform, and base that performance on pipeline. With a small budget to work with, each placement had to be precise — ideally delivering at least 4.0x ROI.
“Because performance for us is based on ROI from our pipeline, we have to be diligent about placing our content with the right target audience.”
From steady initial success to a record breaking placement reaching both net-new and upsell prospects
After putting TLDR’s cachet to the test with some initial flagship placements, it didn’t take long to prove out performance. Plaid’s 2024 “Fintech Predictions” content promotion ad drove ~$80k in pipeline, achieving an ROI of 4.6x, well above their targets. The Plaid team also ran two placements to promote registrations for their 2024 flagship virtual event, and TLDR was the top driver of registrants amongst all the channels they used.
One year later, their placement promoting the 2025 version of “Fintech Predictions” drove 70 leads and added a whopping $382k in pipeline, delivering a 20.1x ROI, making it their best-performing direct buy to date.
“Those figures were obviously great indicators of success, but what we were also pleased to see was that we were reaching both net-new and existing customers. That tells me that we’re speaking not only to new audiences with TLDR, but we’re also reaching the audience we already have in a unique way and leading them to open a new opportunity.”
More than a publisher: TLDR’s collaborative optimization process
Beyond great results, Simone and her team found TLDR’s collaborative process to be an essential step in getting there.
“From the start, the TLDR team brought a real focus to understanding Plaid’s performance goals, staying responsive, and offering guidance on how to make each placement count. That support is what allowed us to prove out performance, and it’s ultimately what led us to rebook.”
Plaid ad examples
