Klarna Returns to Big Brand Ads After Three Years - and Does It All In-House With a Footballer
Updated: 1 day ago
Klarna's Shower Thoughts, live since 17 October 2026, is its first international brand campaign in over three years and was produced entirely in-house.
Three years, no agency, one striker
Klarna is back on the big screen. Shower Thoughts, live since 17 October 2026, is the buy-now-pay-later company's first international brand campaign in more than three years, and the production credit is the story: it was made entirely in-house.
In Germany the campaign is fronted by national-team striker Deniz Undav, the kind of recognisable face a brand would once have reached through an agency's talent and production machine. It runs across YouTube, Meta and connected TV on Amazon Prime, RTL+ and Joyn, spanning the US, UK, Sweden, Italy and Germany, with Christmas editions due in December.
That spread of platforms and markets, delivered without a lead creative agency, is exactly the point Klarna wants observers to take away. This is not a scrappy social experiment; it is a full international brand campaign run by an internal team.
The AI thread nobody should miss
Klarna's confidence here did not appear overnight. The company said back in 2024 that AI tooling had helped it cut external marketing spend by roughly 25%. Shower Thoughts is what that reduction looks like once it matures into a strategy rather than a cost line.
The sequence matters for anyone studying the agency model. First you use AI to trim what you pay outside vendors, then you use the capability and the savings to build an internal team that can handle a flagship brief, and finally you stop needing the agency for the flagship at all.
Klarna is signalling that the in-house shift has reached the top of the funnel. Brand-building, long considered the last redoubt of external creative expertise, is now something it believes it can own.
It is worth being precise about what AI did and did not do here. It did not write the campaign or cast the striker; it lowered the cost and time of production enough that an internal team could plausibly carry a multi-market brief. The technology removed the economic objection to in-housing, and once that objection fell, the organisational decision followed. That is the sequence worth watching across every category, not the promise of AI making ads by itself.
What this means for the agency relationship
The transferable lesson is not that every brand should fire its agency. It is that the default assumption, that a major brand campaign requires an external creative shop, is no longer safe. The question a marketing leader should ask is which capabilities genuinely must live outside and which can now be built in.
Klarna's model suggests a split. Access to scarce talent, big-name athletes, and distribution deals still benefits from partners. But the day-to-day ideation, production and iteration of brand content is increasingly viable inside, especially when AI compresses the cost and time of making things.
For agencies, the strategic response is to move up the value chain toward the things a brand cannot easily replicate: cultural insight, access, and genuinely novel ideas. Selling production hours to a client that has just built its own studio is a losing game.
The choice of connected TV platforms, Amazon Prime, RTL+ and Joyn alongside YouTube and Meta, is its own signal. A fintech returning to brand-building after three years is not buying cheap performance clicks; it is buying the kind of broad, lean-back reach that builds mental availability. That Klarna felt confident enough to place that bet with no external creative agency behind it is the most telling detail of all. The December Christmas editions hint at the final piece: sustainability. In-housing only pays off if the team can keep producing, iterating and refreshing the work without reaching back for outside help each time, and a pipeline of seasonal editions produced internally proves the capability is real and repeatable rather than a one-off.
Quick FAQ
What is Klarna's Shower Thoughts campaign?
It is Klarna's first international brand campaign in over three years, live since 17 October 2026. In Germany it is fronted by national-team striker Deniz Undav, with Christmas editions due in December.
Did Klarna use an agency?
No. The campaign was produced entirely in-house across the US, UK, Sweden, Italy and Germany, running on YouTube, Meta and connected TV including Amazon Prime, RTL+ and Joyn.
How does AI fit in?
Klarna said in 2024 that AI tooling helped cut external marketing spend by roughly 25%. The in-house campaign is the strategic result of that capability maturing.
Klarna has quietly crossed a line many brands assumed was uncrossable. Brand-building was supposed to be the one job you could not take fully in-house. By pairing AI-driven efficiency with a recognisable striker and a multi-market CTV buy, it has shown the agency is no longer a default for the flagship. — Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing
The assumption that a flagship brand campaign needs an external creative agency is no longer safe, and the brands proving it are moving first.
Which of your marketing capabilities genuinely must stay external, and which could you build in-house today?
If you would like to know more about this topic, please contact us on danieln@merxmarketing.co.uk
Sources: Horizont, W&V, Meedia
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Written by Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing Ltd and Marketing Minute
