The team behind a new global broker, Elev8, launched an unprecedented campaign in the sector: suffice it to say, its high point was nothing less than a trade executed in space. Below is the story of what it takes to create and launch a global brokerage brand.
The lay of the land
The brokerage industry is highly homogenous in branding and advertising: the competition between global brands looks a lot like a long strategic battle where players prefer small improvements over bold, risky moves. Brokerage brands prioritize risk management in marketing as their clients do in their trading sessions.
No wonder, then, that marketing imagery in brokerage tends to stick to the time-proven tropes. Here, bulls and bears reign supreme as the easily recognized symbols of upward and downward price momentum. Price charts with red and green candles add a final touch to this threadbare visual narrative.
The Elev8 team decided to aim for recognition from step one. In the brokerage industry, that meant forgetting about bulls, bears and other clichés—and coming up with something vibrant, emotionally engaging and out-of-the-box.
First step: Name as a motto
When the Elev8 team approached the task of understanding clients' expectations and wants, it seemed like quite a task. According to statistics, most traders quit within the first months or years and those who remain become set in their choice of trading tools. They stopped questioning their choice a long time ago—and to nudge them to reconsider, a brand would have to be consistent and innovative in its messaging.
The name of the new brand reflected its mission: to elevate the traders' experience and help them reach a new level by empowering them across every point of contact. In this case, the name was the message and the mission. It was to serve as a filter and guiding principle for any communications and activities to come—anything that didn't empower traders and elevate their experience had to go.
However, the new name had a serious issue at its core: the word 'elevate' could not be registered as a trademark without alterations, since it was not unique and not descriptive of the brokerage industry. A numeronym had to be used to avoid the judicial dead end—and, as it turned out, the number eight that replaced a part of the word played its role in the brand's visual identity, too.
Visual DNA: Outlining the ambition
When preparing to build the new brokerage brand's identity from scratch, Elev8's creative team first approached the task by the book: compiling a list of agencies, then onboarding and pitching the top candidates. As a result, a well-reputed and highly experienced agency was selected. But despite the initial chemistry with the branding firm, it was the old-and-tested design service team that eventually did the job—and hit the bull's eye.
As a result of their work, the core element of the new visual identity was born—the monogram ‘E8.’ The key feature of the logo—a slash line cutting the monogram in half—symbolized an angle of elevation, the angle formed between a horizontal line of sight and the line of sight up to an object. This line makes the logo more dynamic while molding the letter and the number within a single visual element—sleek and expressive of the brand's modern, tech-driven character.
In addition to defining the logo, the diagonal line cutting the 'E8' in half scales across all branding elements. It creates a break that makes text more readable, be it market quotes, currency pairs, abbreviations or infographics. It also cuts off the noise, making the visuals more distinct.
The color scheme reflected the main image of Elev8's promo launch video. Equipped with a trading app, a trader gets elevated high in the sky—and enjoys the company of his empowered fellow traders among the clouds. Transparency, drive and ambition—contrasting brand colors worked well across all target channels: the site, brand communications and the trading product and tools.
The launch
When it comes to marketing communications, the competitive landscape in brokerage is hard to read: top brands strongly overlap in their positioning and often adjust messaging based on short-term goals. Given this fluid, fuzzy and rather monotonous environment, competitive brand analysis can hardly bring any distinctive results.
Given this unclear lay of the land, Elev8 had no alternatives but to produce a distinctly positioned launch creative and make a statement from the get-go. Otherwise, the audiences wouldn't pay attention, being used to a highly competitive industry landscape where the 'different words, same narratives' scenario has been dominating for years.
For the launch campaign, failing to elicit a reaction from the audience would mean a wasted budget. Given the circumstances, a launch campaign that doesn't immediately distinguish the brand from competition would be as good as starting with a handicap—after all, a new brand is always at a disadvantage in terms of recognition.
To AI or not to AI?
The entire process of creating a flagship video for the launch campaign—from the kickoff meeting to the master cut—took the team about three months. Given the tight time restrictions, it seemed logical to outsource the video to AI. Generated personas and images have indeed been in the toolbox for Elev8 during the brand creation process—ignoring modern tech while building an identity for a tech-first brand would be counter intuitive, to say the least. However, when it came to the launch video, the Elev8 team decided against AI assistance—their top priority was to stand out from the competition and achieving that in 2026 means committing to human-focused, human-produced content.
AI-generated visuals in 2026 have a recognizable aesthetic—polished, compositionally smooth, uncanny in their hyper-realism. On the other hand, they often have the all-too-well-recognizable dead eyes, synthetic expressions and plastic faces. As a result, more viewers are routinely skipping AI-generated videos.
In its campaign, Elev8 targeted experienced traders with high sensitivity to brand signals. Therefore, no production shortcuts were available for the flagship footage: Elev8's claim about solid infrastructure and an experienced team behind the brand wouldn't hold water for the audiences if its spearheading visuals were outsourced to AI.
Elev8 opted for a live-footage style video enhanced with CGI. The acting was to exude raw emotion—it was the case when every scene and every clip counted. Generated visuals often come across as generic and discerning viewers feel the difference even if they can't always put their finger on where the deception lies. Here, on the other hand, the trend for live acting and hand-made creatives came out victorious.
Above the clouds
But the icing on the cake was yet to come. To really make a difference with its launch campaign, Elev8 decided to raise the bar to the sky. Literally. How to better illustrate the new brand name and the broker's mission than bringing CFD trading into space?
On February 26th 2026, a flying vessel equipped with a massive, 25-meter-wide hydrogen-filled balloon lifted a smartphone running the Elev8 trading app to the stratosphere. There, at an altitude of 30 kilometers, the broker executed the first CFD transaction ever completed on the edge of space. Despite the freezing temperatures and the challenges of maintaining connectivity at the edge of the vacuum, the trade was executed and registered successfully.
The 'space mission' involved launching the craft, performing a long ascent into the stratosphere and executing a trade at extreme conditions—the temperatures plunged to as low as -65°C. The successful execution and secure retrieval of the smartphone demonstrated the brand's claim—first and foremost, the reliability of Elev8’s infrastructure and the limitless possibilities of empowered trading.
Elev8's branding and promo campaign highlights some distinct marketing trends visible in other sectors. First, in some cases, an old-and-tested team—in this case, a partner service team rather than an in-house one—understands the industry's nuances and the client's needs better than the most reputable agency and can deliver even under severe constraints. Second, that AI-generated visuals in 2026 are not a cure-all solution: for one, they have a recognizable aesthetic that does not align with cases that require raw, unfiltered human emotion. And last but not least, in a saturated, highly competitive market, a brand has to present its messaging consistently across all channels and communications to be heard.
