Cash App’s in-house creative team and production company Object & Animal also developed the spot. 

“The idea was to create genuine curiosity by letting people encounter the spot in theaters first, before we fully owned it as a brand campaign,” Ferdon said.

Incentivizing theater-goers

Cash App has run theater ads before, including previous collaborations with Kendrick Lamar and Ray Dalio. This campaign will also include limited edition Cash App Card stamps designed with Chalamet, which it has done with past celebrity talent, as well as out-of-home ads and placements on TV, streaming, and social platforms. 

While Cash App is Chalamet’s first financial services brand partner, it’s not his first brand deal. Other past partners include Cartier, Apple TV+, and Chanel. His fans were also among the first to post about the Cash App ad over the weekend. 

To incentivize theater-goers, Ferdon said the company has offered to pay for some fans’ tickets, replying to people’s posts on X and TikTok offering to give them $25 via their Cash App account. The theater approach lets Cash App “cut through the noise” instead of doing a “regular brand campaign,” she said. 

“We noticed it’s a great way to spark organic conversation especially among younger people, because it is so unexpected,” Ferdon said. “People are not necessarily sitting down with a bucket of popcorn expecting to see a commercial. When these are played in a most art-forward way with a highbrow approach to taking a cinematic level to the creative, it really does stand out.”

Back to basics

With 57 million users, Cash App is competing in a crowded peer-to-peer payments market against competitors like Venmo, PayPal, and Zelle. In May, weaker-than-expected results sent shares of parent company Block down 20%.

Speaking with investors at the time, Block CEO Jack Dorsey said 2025 growth would be driven by expanding its base of teens and families. The company’s plan will include “looking deeply at our marketing spend and investing in something that we know works,” he said.

“I just don’t think we were focused enough and had enough attention on the network and the network density,” Dorsey told investors. “That is our foundation… We need to make sure that we continuously grow our network, and that starts with peer-to-peer.”