The CEO Pulling Marketing Levers At ClearScore: Justin Basini On Building His Brand

A chief executive with a firm grasp of marketing is a rare beast - according to recruitment firm Spencer Stuart, only 10 per cent of Fortune 250 CEOs have marketing experience. But Justin Basini is not just a marketer turned CEO, he’s also the founder of the company and one of the UK's leading tech entrepreneurs.

Basini heads up ClearScore, a tech platform that helps users understand their credit and finances with 23 million users around the world, including 15 million in the UK. He launched the business back in 2015 but this is one CEO who put in the hard marketing yards before taking the tiller, starting his career at Procter & Gamble and then switching to the world of finance marketing.

And what’s completely clear is that marketing –understanding customers, believing fiercely in the power of a brand – runs through everything Basini does to build the ClearScore business. As Jonathan Trimble, co-founder of And Rising, the agency behind ClearScore's advertising, puts it: “Product, brand, sales, and growth are all interconnected for him.”

So perhaps it’s really not surprising that real people seem to quite like ClearScore’s advertising. Even taking Creative Salon’s traffic as a guide, And Rising’s new Charlie and Moose work is hugely popular - it’s the second most read piece of content on our website so far this year, as tens of thousands of (normal) people have Googled the campaign and found their way to our article.

But as Basini explains, getting to a consistent creative idea and navigating through the challenges of empowering a marketing team hasn’t been a straight-forward journey, despite – and at times because of - his own marketing nous.

When in doubt, the marketer-turned-entrepreneur always falls back on the lessons he learnt at P&G, so many of which still hold true today. They are lessons he took with him through stints as the global head of brands and marketing at Deutsche Bank, the VP of marketing and brand at Capital One, and now as a Fellow of the RSA, trustee of Hampton Court's Choral Foundation (he sang at the Chapel Royal as a child and says the discipline he experienced there was formative), chair of The Money Charity and non-exec of the Competition and Markets Authority. And of course, those P&G principles have helped shape the ClearScore brand.

To explore that journey from marketer to CEO of his own business, we sat down with Basini to discuss how he has built ClearScore to become the UK's biggest credit-checking app.

Creative Salon: You’ve got a background in marketing, how has that helped you as a business leader and an entrepreneur?

Justin Basini I think it has been a major advantage. I still go back to and practise the materials I was given at P&G, even now. It's 25 years later, a completely different world, a different context, but I have a little photocopied document on how to write concepts, and it’s still so relevant and useful.

The core engine of marketing in its truest sense is central to how I think about building this business—addressing consumer needs, really trying to think about the insights that we’re driving. Many of the techniques I learned at P&G—ad testing, the power of creative product development processes, investing in market research and insight—we practise here.

But I think this relentless focus on the metrics of marketing, which allow you to have the conversation with the CEO or the CFO, has led us down a garden path. Now, many young marketers I see across the industry are channel specialists. That whole discipline I was taught at P&G—being responsible for the consumer, the brand, the P&L, and thinking through the growth strategy in the short, medium, and long term—is not owned by marketing anymore.

So what are the learnings here that would be useful for other CEOs?

The first thing I would say is you have to be able to nail the proposition in 10 words or less. That’s why we have "Your credit score and report for free forever." That's the proposition—eight words. You put that on TV in a category where people are used to spending money on seeing their own data, and boom, it took off. The first point is that clarity of proposition—what is that single line?

The second thing is I’ve never believed in this paradigm of performance versus brand. When you put anything into the market, you are building both performance and brand. Channels do it in different ways, right? Maybe TV ads build your brand and have less acquisition, though that’s not been true for ClearScore, whereas Meta may be more performance than brand—but really, they do both.

Too many businesses have too much channel specificity. Many companies now have chief customer officers or chief growth officers. Those roles used to be marketing. I think it's a shame that it's not called marketing anymore. I tell our marketers, "Step above your channel. Yes, you might be in control of our Meta spend or our TikTok spend or our TV advertising, but actually, what are we trying to do? We're trying to create memory structures in people's brains. I love that phrase—'A brand is a promise that, when kept, creates preference.' It’s my favourite encapsulation of brand. What are you promising through that Meta ad, TikTok ad, or TV ad? How is that going to get delivered? Ask the product people, ask the people around the website. Ultimately, if you want to fulfil your potential and rise up, you need to show more strategic thinking skills, not just 'I can run my channel really effectively'".

Having been a marketing practitioner, is it easy for you to step back and let your marketing teams get on with it now?

I get involved all the time. I'm far too involved in everything in this company. When I set the business up, I covered many bases—I was the chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief product officer (CPO). As we grew, my Board advised me, "You need to build the team, you need bench strength." So we brought in CMOs and CPOs who were super qualified, really good people, and delivered a lot. But I got layered away from the day-to-day. I was becoming more frustrated, thinking we were going slower, and not driving into the market in the way I wanted. We lost some of the joie de vivre we had before.

So we did a restructure at the end of last year, which unlocked a lot of energy by going back to a P&G model. I now have teams that work on upstream product and marketing development, and that's where the latest Charlie and Moose ad campaign came from. Then I have my platform team—building the core technologies and capabilities we need to deliver the product. And then I have go-to-market teams that take the product into the market.

One of the things it’s unlocked is this [Charlie and Moose] campaign. Instead of having competing marketing teams with some budget in each of my markets, creating global drift of the brand by doing different things, we stepped back and reviewed the assets we have. We worked with System 1, testing every creative we've had in the market at every length around the world. It cost about £30,000, and it was the easiest money I’ve ever spent.

It was clear that in 2015-2016, when we came out with Moose, we had found something that created memory structures. But as we professionalised the function, bringing in marketing directors and CMOs, who wanted new ad agencies or new creative directions, we moved away from that. We’re not a micromanagement company, and I was told to empower the team, so we went through a journey of mediocre creative—we’d get something out, it was okay, then move on to the next. When I looked at the costs, we'd spent about £1.5 million globally on creative over the last few years because each team had production budgets and was shooting their own ads.

The final piece of this story was that I ended up going to an ad shoot in Canada. At P&G, I was taught not to turn up to ad shoots, to trust the agency. But I was in Canada, so I turned up for half a day. It was inefficient—hundreds of people running around, burning loads of film doing versions that would never get used. I thought there must be a better way. I had lunch with Jonathan Trimble from And Rising, and although we weren’t working with them at the time, I trusted him. I told him, "I want to shoot a mini-series—a 10-minute film about Moose and Charlie’s life over time, talking about their financial challenges. We’ll do it globally, chunk it up into 30-second commercials, five-second TikTok spots, and other formats, giving us material to last 18 months to two years."

So yes I’ve become more involved in certain areas, strategically. I’m not managing the day-to-day, but I’m much more involved in upstream product development and brand direction now. I see brand as central to everything we do, so I’ve taken back ownership of that.

Where did that grit come from to make the leap to become an entrepreneur?

I learned at P&G that I didn’t enjoy having bosses. The corporate structure frustrated me, though I respect companies like P&G. Then, in my twenties, I had a nervous breakdown. I did a lot of work on my attitude toward achievement, risk, and how I was wired, including therapy. That’s been very helpful. I’m not money-motivated, so I have a pretty open attitude to risk—probably too much sometimes. That’s caused issues in my personal life. I’m divorced, and I’ve made decisions that prioritised my desire to create over providing a comfortable life for my family. There are consequences to that. But ultimately, I see money as a scorecard. What I really value is employing people and helping our 22 million users globally. We influence their lives in small ways, and that’s what motivates me.

What have been the big surprises as ClearScore has grown?

The biggest surprise was how quickly the business gained traction. We launched on July 15, 2015, and by the end of the year, we had 600,000 users and made £1 million in revenue. 12 months later, we had 3.3 million users and £13.3 million in revenue. In 18 months, it just took off. I’m an optimist, so even though we had optimistic plans, we beat them twofold. The speed of that traction was incredible.

Another surprise was how important the quality of the initial product was. I railed against the idea of the minimum viable product (MVP). I think MVPs—especially in consumer businesses—are a mistake. Instead, I believe in creating a minimum lovable product (MLP), something brilliant at one thing with a great experience. You only get one chance to make a first impression. If your brand looks bad or the sign-up process is flawed, then that customer is gone. Getting that right has been a major driver of our success.

What's your perspective on how AI might work for you in the advertising space? Do you ever see a time when a future iteration of Charlie and Moose might be AI-generated?

We use AI for things like creating images, especially for Meta and similar platforms, but I don’t believe it will replace the core decision-making and subtleties of crafting story arcs. For instance, in Series one of Charlie and Moose, we explore common situations in the UK—Charlie loses his job, his partner falls pregnant, they’re looking for a new car, etc. Millions of people go through those things, but where the story goes next is something AI can’t fully work out. That’s where collaboration with people like Jonathan Trimble and And Rising comes in. We really think about where we want to take that story. AI can help along the way, but it won’t replace the craft.

For example, the best-performing ad in the Charlie and Moose series is the washing machine ad. It’s a softer ad, so you wouldn’t necessarily pick it just by looking at it, but it tests brilliantly everywhere because of the characterisation and the relationship interplay. That comes through the script and the way it’s shot. We were lucky to have Anna and Vaughan Arnell on writing and direction, and with And Rising, we built a writer's room much like a TV show. I believe in the power of people coming together in the right environments to create breakthroughs.

On set, I didn’t want the typical focus on whether the client is happy, whether we’ve got enough shots for the 30-second ad, and ticking boxes. I told the team, "Just allow the brilliance to happen. You’re bringing together talented people, so let them create amazing things." That’s the magic. AI and technology can make things more efficient or scalable—like using real shots of Moose, but supplementing them with AI-generated ones. But AI will never replace the brilliance of human collaboration.

You've talked publicly about your mental health experiences. How much has that shaped you as a leader?

When I was having problems in my 20s, I made some foolish decisions. I got into debt. So when I speak to ClearScore users who are struggling with finances, the cost of living, or are heavily indebted, I think back to my own experience of being £30,000 in debt on credit cards, even putting people's salaries on credit cards, and having a suicidal episode. I now see clearly how work and financial struggles can affect your mental health.

Looking back, I can also see that I hadn’t done the necessary work on myself. I didn’t have a strong sense of how I was wired or how I would react to things. I was fragile, and things got out of control. When I set up ClearScore, I said I wanted it to be a high-productivity, high-performance environment. I tell everyone who joins, "ClearScore is not an easy place to work. It’s going to be fun, you'll learn a lot, but I want you to operate with excellence and drive yourself every day on behalf of our users. It won’t be easy, but you'll have a great time doing it." Sustained high performance requires attention to all aspects of your health—physical and mental. We place that at the core of how we manage people and the support services we provide.

And Rising Co-Founder Jonathan Trimble On Working With Basini

Justin is one of the UK’s standout tech founders, but his background is in marketing—in the broad sense. Product, brand, sales, and growth are all interconnected for him. He thinks like an industrial designer, blending business, creativity, and technology. For him, ClearScore is a product people use every day, with the audience always at the center. He constantly asks, "What will they enjoy? What will they relate to? What makes us useful? How can we level with them? What do they need?" Every decision is made with the user in mind.

While competitors create characters like Meerkats and Judi Dench for "brand building," Charlie and Moose are there for the audience. Watching them navigate their world shows us that we, too, can handle life’s ups and downs—and money—with courage and heart.