Case Studies / The Dubs Agency
How The Dubs Agency raised the bar for financial services content with Vev
148% uplift in engagement. No PDF.
Industry
Financial services content & media
Headquarters
London, with offices in Singapore and Sydney
Use Cases
Immersive reports
Content hubs
Global campaign experiences
148%
Uplift in engagement
22%
Reduced page bounce rate
20%
Completion rate
About The Dubs Agency
The Dubs Agency is a specialist content and media agency with 30 years of experience working exclusively within financial services. For the past 15 years, the team has focused almost entirely on asset and investment management, creating and distributing content for some of the world's largest financial institutions, including Nuveen, TIAA, Vanguard, Alliance Bernstein, and Man Group.
With offices in London, Singapore, and Sydney, The Dubs Agency manages content strategies across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Their role spans strategy, creative, editorial, and media distribution, making them one of the most experienced agencies operating in this particular niche.
The challenge that has defined Tristan Fawley's work for the past decade: convincing trillion-dollar, risk-averse institutions that the PDF—long the default format for thought leadership and investor content—is no longer fit for purpose.
The Challenge
Breaking the PDF habit in one of the world's most conservative industries
Financial services institutions are not early adopters. They are compliance-heavy, risk-averse, and often deeply attached to formats that have served them for decades. The PDF sits at the centre of this: for major asset managers, the annual investor report produced as a PDF has been the standard for as long as anyone can remember.
But, Tristan Fawley had seen a better way. As far back as 2015, The Dubs Agency had built a fully hardcoded, immersive long-form digital experience—all custom JavaScript, HTML, and CSS—for a global asset management client. It was market-leading for its time. But without a platform to support it, it was impossible to scale.
Fast-forward to today, and Tristan's pitch to clients is the same, only now he has the data, the tools, and (crucially) the proof.
"The arguments for keeping PDFs were getting less and less relevant. A PDF isn't mobile-optimised, it's not built for digital consumption, and you get no data from it apart from a download. You don't know if anyone's actually read it."
Tristan Fawley, Executive Creative Director, The Dubs Agency
When Tristan presented to Nuveen's leadership in 2024, he called his deck Death to the PDF. It was a deliberate provocation—and it worked.
"People came back to me and said, 'Oh yeah, I was in that presentation where you talked about death to the PDF.' I thought: great, we’re remembered for it." - Tristan Fawley
The problem wasn't just about format. It was structural. Conservative clients were nervous about integrating third-party platforms into their websites: information security reviews, compliance sign-offs, developer backlogs measured in sprints rather than days. The road from this is a great idea to it's live on our website was long.
The Solution
Vev as the platform for embedded, analytics-rich experiences
The Dubs Agency had used other tools in the no-code space before landing on Vev. The shift was decisive.
"None of them delivered what Vev delivers for us when it comes to the optimisation of the content, the tools to build what we want to build, and the integration. The fact that the content lives on the client’s site—even though it's an embedded web experience—is really key."
Tristan Fawley, Executive Creative Director, The Dubs Agency
The model The Dubs Agency has built with Vev is based on embedded experiences: Vev projects sit inside client websites, inheriting the client's analytics stack—scroll depth tracking, heat mapping, user tracking—and sitting within the client's domain for SEO value. Users arrive via a URL, navigate through header and footer, and can continue a journey beyond the report itself.
It's a meaningful shift from the PDF model. When a PDF gets downloaded, the data trail ends. When someone reads an embedded Vev experience, every scroll and interaction is measurable.
"When it's an embedded experience, it can adopt all of those analytics. From a user journey perspective, you can drive people to a URL, build a journey from that piece of content onwards. When it's a standalone PDF, it has less opportunity to do that."
Tristan Fawley, Executive Creative Director, The Dubs Agency
On the production side, the shift has been equally significant. The Dubs Agency no longer employs a large developer team. They had 30–40 developers on staff in their earlier years. Now, designers build directly in Vev.
Project Spotlight 1
Nuveen Equilibrium: From a PDF download to a flagship digital report
Nuveen's annual Equilibrium report is one of the most important pieces of content the asset manager produces each year. It's a flagship publication for a global institutional investor audience—the kind of content that defines a brand's thought leadership positioning.
Before The Dubs Agency brought in Vev, Equilibrium was a PDF linked from a basic landing page. A static chart. A download button. No mobile experience. No engagement data.
The Dubs Agency introduced Vev in two stages. In 2025, they built the landing page in Vev and linked through to a PDF. In 2026, the PDF was gone entirely. The digital experience was the report.
"In two years we've gone from a PDF to no PDF, and I'm very proud of that."
Tristan Fawley, Executive Creative Director, The Dubs Agency
What The Dubs Agency built
The 2026 Equilibrium experience is a full-bleed, mobile-responsive, immersive digital report built and embedded in Vev. It combines:
Editorial hierarchy and chaptering: Structured navigation with sticky chapter headers (engineered to work correctly within an embedded experience, which required specific technical work with Nuveen's development team)
Interactive data visualisation: Live Infogram charts embedded seamlessly into the Vev canvas, with regionalized data segmentation allowing users to filter results by geography (global, Germany, Japan)
Custom video storytelling: Raw survey data translated into animated video, then embedded into Vev with custom-coded playback controls. (Heat mapping from the 2025 version had shown that users were pausing on the autoplay video but couldn't interact with it. The 2026 version corrected this.)
Onward journey: From the report, users can continue to a personalised data form, extending the content's role in lead generation
The report was produced in three language versions—English, German, and Japanese—with each requiring approximately one day to localise within Vev, including font adjustments for Japanese.
The Results
All figures are versus 2024, when no immersive experience was used.
Immersive experience delivered versus 2024, when no immersive experience was used
20% of all visitors completing a long-form institutional research report is a significant result in any sector. In financial services, where audiences are time-poor and content is dense, it speaks directly to the value of immersive, navigable digital experiences over static PDFs.
The 25% figure for German audiences reaching the end lead generation form also validates the localisation strategy: producing separate, language-first Vev projects for each region—rather than a single English-language version—meaningfully improved downstream conversion.
The project has since won multiple industry awards, including the FCS Portfolio Award (Silver) (submitted jointly by The Dubs Agency and Nuveen) and both the Gramercy Institute Asset Management and Financial Content Marketing awards.
"It's surpassed any benchmarks we set for it. That's the reason why more people are doing this now."
Tristan Fawley, Executive Creative Director, The Dubs Agency
Project Spotlight 2
TIAA TMRW: Building a content hub in Vev
TIAA, the US retirement and financial services organisation and parent company of Nuveen, publishes a regular editorial series called TMRW, a publication focused on retirement planning for plan sponsors.
The challenge for the TMRW series was different to Equilibrium: less about replacing a PDF, more about creating a cohesive content experience across multiple articles within a single editorial edition.
The Dubs Agency used Vev's carousel component in a way it wasn't explicitly designed for: as the navigational spine of an article hub. The landing page for each edition of TMRW features a carousel of the edition's articles. Within each article page, the same carousel appears again at the bottom, allowing readers to move freely between any piece in the series, rather than encountering a standard "related content" block at the end of a page.
"As opposed to the traditional model where you get to the bottom of an article and there are a couple of related links, we wanted it to be: you could go anywhere you want, move between any of these articles if you want to. That seemed like an elegant way to use an existing Vev component in quite a different way."
Tristan Fawley, Executive Creative Director, The Dubs Agency
The TMRW experience also sits fully embedded within TIAA's website; the client's header and footer wrap the experience, meaning all engagement tracking, SEO value, and user journey data flows back into TIAA's own analytics infrastructure.
Agency impact: creative freedom, leaner teams, more to sell
The Dubs Agency's adoption of Vev has changed how the agency operates at a structural level.
Headcount is leaner. Designers who previously worked primarily in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign have transitioned into Vev, taking on work that previously required developer involvement. The agency's ability to produce and iterate quickly means they can take on more of this type of work per client, and expand the service into new client relationships.
"It's allowed us to be as creative as we want to be. You have the freedom to express creatively what you want—something you couldn't do in a more traditional CMS or templated structure. And the way we operate on the platform does allow us to do things quickly, therefore cost-effectively, which means we can sell more of it."
Tristan Fawley, Executive Creative Director, The Dubs Agency
Awards have also become a strategic tool. For clients in conservative sectors, industry recognition provides the social proof that helps move cautious decision-makers. When Nuveen submitted the Equilibrium project for the FCS Portfolio Award, and won, it validated the direction to internal stakeholders as much as to the market.
What's next?
The next evolution for The Dubs Agency and their clients is scalability. The flagship projects like Equilibrium and TMRW are built largely bespoke. The logical next step is investing in Libraries: reusable Vev design systems that allow future reports and publications to be built faster, with less from-scratch work, while maintaining the quality and brand consistency clients expect.
For Tristan, the larger mission hasn't changed: to make immersive digital experiences the standard in financial services content, not the exception.
"I've now got Nuveen, TIAA, Aberdeen Investments, and others. I can now start to set a precedent that this is the only way to do it—not the exception. The standard. And the analytics behind that are the way we can reinforce the why. Because there are no analytics from PDFs."
Tristan Fawley, Executive Creative Director, The Dubs Agency
The Dubs Agency is a London-based financial services content agency with offices in London, Singapore and Sydney. Tristan Fawley is Executive Creative Director.