The Organization

Hometap is a Boston-based home equity investment company that gives homeowners access to cash in exchange for a share of their home's future value — no loan, no monthly payments, no credit score required. In a financial services landscape built on familiar debt instruments, Hometap was asking homeowners to think about their home not just as where they live, but as an asset with options. That's a significant cognitive shift to ask of someone before they've decided to trust you.

The Communication Problem

The product works. The challenge was that understanding it requires a homeowner to first let go of a deeply ingrained mental model — that accessing home equity means taking on debt. Hometap isn't a lender. It's an investor. And that distinction, while meaningful and genuinely beneficial to the right homeowner, requires explanation before it can become trust.

A homeowner landing on Hometap's website or seeing their content in a social feed has seconds to grasp something that runs counter to everything they know about home financing. If the communication can't carry the concept quickly enough, the product's real value never lands.

The Thinking

The central insight in SVG's approach to the Hometap brand video was that the product's value couldn't be explained by Hometap alone — it had to be felt through the people it had already helped. Hometap's leadership could articulate the mission clearly and compellingly. But a homeowner evaluating a novel financial product needs to see themselves in someone who has already made the leap.

That meant the brand video needed two things working simultaneously: the credibility of leadership speaking directly to the mission, and the emotional permission that comes from real customers describing their experience in their own words. Neither alone would be sufficient. The CEO explaining the concept builds legitimacy. A customer describing how it changed their situation builds trust. Together they close the gap between comprehension and action.

The same logic shaped how SVG approached the client testimonial work. The long-form testimonial featuring Nana Appaw — a real estate investor who used Hometap to fund a property acquisition — wasn't just a satisfied customer story. It was a proof-of-concept demonstration for a specific audience: homeowners who are entrepreneurially minded, equity-rich but cash-constrained, and skeptical that any financial product could actually deliver on its promise without hidden complexity. Nana's story spoke directly to that skepticism because he had lived it.

The Work

A brand video featuring Hometap's CEO, CMO, and key employees alongside customer stories — shot with a Sony Venice camera and Steadicam to achieve a visual quality that matched the seriousness of the financial decision being communicated. From that foundation the relationship expanded: client testimonials shot and edited in long form, then adapted into platform-specific social media versions across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn in four aspect ratios. A separate Small Business Week campaign in 2022 featured five small business owners who had used Hometap during the pandemic — content that deliberately centered the customers rather than the brand, functioning as a public thank-you rather than a marketing message.