I recently had the chance to attend the The New York City Advertising Club's (www.theadvertisingclub.org) lunch seminar on the topic of ‘What’s New in Financial Services Marketing?'
The event featured a lively discussion of new advertising forms, the difficulties of reaching audiences, and the challenge of making messages relevant and interesting! The context was financial services, but many of the points made had wider relevance too.
The panel was top-notch and appropriate for the discussions at hand: Nick Utton (Chief Marketing Officer, E*Trade), Laurine Garrity (Chief Marketing Officer, TD Ameritrade), Nancy Friedman (VP Advertising, Visa), Guinero Floro (Head of Advertising, Brand and Media, Ameriprise Financial Services) and Brad Jakeman (MD Global Advertising, Citibank).
Overall, the speakers felt that while consumer marketing of financial services had come a long way and was now as effective as it’d ever been, serious questions still remained about what was really working, and how the increasingly complex and changing consumer and technological landscapes should be best tackled.
Here are some of the themes that came through:
Relating to Consumers more Deeply
For a long time, financial services were portrayed as being serious and frankly, rather dull. Recent efforts have tried to make banks and investment firms seem less austere and distant, and a vital part of everyday life , affecting all of us and the big decisions we face. Though money is undoubtedly an ‘important’ topic for most of us, it doesn’t mean it can’t treated with humor or humanity! The success of campaigns like ‘Life takes Visa’, ‘Priceless’ (Mastercard), ‘Live Richly’ (Citibank) and ‘My Life, My Card’ (Amex) (http://www.mylifemycard.com/) are due to understanding this trend (and executing upon it well!).
Getting in touch with consumers’ ‘emotional’ sides doesn’t mean that financial specifics have to completely replaced by images of happy, financially-secure families playing board games together! But the facts that are brought to bear need to be screened for relevancy. For example, rate levels on different investment products are probably better explained through a bank representative or a website than on a TV ad. On the other hand, security has come up time and again as being particularly important to consumers, especially since 2001, and so it makes sense that a number of panel participants mentioned how they’ve been stressing their security solutions such as ID theft insurance in their marketing messages.
Getting to know consumers better has helped challenge long-held assumptions too. For example, retirement advertising generally relied on using scare-tactics focusing on ‘will you be prepared?’ and the dangers of failing to acquire sufficient coverage. However Guinero Floro of Ameriprise mentioned research with the current batch of baby-boomers now retiring that uncovered a greater sense of ‘positive anticipation’ rather than fear, which is translating through to their work which now stresses the ‘joys of a secure retirement’.
Brad Jakeman gave a nice example of how banks have had to think about translating internal capabilities into customer benefits. He explained that years ago highlighting that they were the ‘biggest bank’ was a positive in itself, offering a sense of stability and trust. But now being a ‘corporate monolith’ brings with it some negative connotations. So does Citibank’s size remain an asset? And what is the value of having 8000 branches? He explained it as a question of framing - with ‘There’s a Citibank branch just around the corner from you’ the consumer benefit jumps out.
Interacting with Customers in New Ways
The change in the ways we interact with one another, and with products and companies, has affected financial services marketing as it has so many areas.
Nationwide Insurance drew special credit for harnessing technological advances and consumer-generated content in ways only previously seen in ‘cooler’ teen-directed consumer categories. To support their ‘Life comes at you Fast’ campaign they solicited videos from consumers that highlighted dramatic moments in their own life via a website, which they then displayed on a Times Square billboard.
http://contextrulesmarketing.blogspot.com/2006/04/marketing-in-times-square-gets-very.html
Again looking beyond the ‘TV, branch and statement flyer’ formula, Nancy Friedman spoke of her efforts to utilize innovative product placement and discussed Visa’s incorporation in video-on-demand products and the brand’s positioning in a new CSI video game.
While pushing the envelope of marketing channel is a legitimate goal in itself, the panelists recognized the issue was really one of maximizing the chances of a message reaching the target. This was becoming increasingly challenging given general message proliferation (Brad quoted a UK study where people were on average being exposed to over 2000 marketing messages a day, but only paid attention to 200 of these, and were only able to recall less than 50).
Helping the chances of message recall is having the message appear in an appropriate form and context. In the online space, Nancy spoke of ‘having the ad in the right way on the right site’ which meant sometimes using rich media, and linking the ad to content. She also quoted Forrester that for 75% of net users random pop-ups are the least favored form of net advertising, and was optimistic that we’d sooner be seeing better forms of online advertising.
Needing a Multi-channel Strategy
New channels coming available aren’t replacing old channels. As Brad Jakeman put it “We got radio, but still kept reading newspapers. We got TV, but still kept going to the cinema.” For him the question was how to ‘integrate across channels’ in a holistic way. This meant to him having “consistent messaging across channels, like a TV and branch campaigns working together…and briefing the call center on the ad campaign ahead of consumers calling in!”
In thinking about this channel integration, a natural next step is to consider that different channels should play different roles. “But there’s a danger of falling into stereotypes and not being creative if you just assume ‘TV is good for brand awareness, the net for direct response’” said Guinero, who went on to note that brands could also be effectively built online.
“More work needs to be done in considering the most effective mix of channels in any campaign”, was the general agreement.
The Holy Grail of Measurement
While there was some lighter relief created by watching some of these great ad executions, the mood sombered when the topic of ‘return on marketing investment’ came up. It seemed like all of these marketing execs had been grilled at some point by other senior colleagues saying “Yes, this all this good – but can we really justify this advertising budget without a better sense of the financial benefits it will bring...”
Attributing marketing spend to results is very difficult, as is optimizing marketing mix spend, the panelists felt.
Nick Utton from e*trade summed up their frustration - “We all know we have to use multi-channels. But we also know that when someone closes a trade online they’ve often already seen an ad for the service and may have discussed it with a rep too - we don’t know. And yet we’re asked about the effectiveness of each channel and we honestly don’t know how to measure that.”
And though this was a challenge, he also framed it as an opportunity : “Get this right though and you’ll be 10 times Google – because we’ll all pay you a lot for these answers...”
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