Ally Bank: Breaking Through the Noise with Innovation and Relevance

Jim Marous:

Hello and welcome to Banking Transformed, the top podcast in retail banking. I'm your host, Jim Marous, founder and CEO of the Digital Bank Report and co-publisher of The Financial Brand. Today we're coming to you from the Financial Brand Forum in Vegas, the biggest event in retail banking. In October of 2021, Ally launched its biggest campaign ever, entitled We're All Better Off with an Ally. It's interesting, this campaign is an extensive of actually a campaign that involved athletes before that, they used the same thing to build on how important it was to have semi-pro athletes having sponsors that can help them achieve their goals. When you look at this, as many banks and credit unions try to hit the same court, they're there on behalf of their customers. The reality is how do you establish yourself as actually doing what you're saying as opposed to just being like everyone else.

My guest in the Banking Transformed podcast is Andrea Brimmer, chief marketing officer and PR officer for Ally Bank. Andrea shares how Ally is hoping to become a primary financial partner when consumers look for somebody to partner and help them with financial wellness. So, Andrea, it's great to have you on the show and it's interesting because anybody who's been listening to the show over any time or even read some of the articles realizes I have a personal story with Ally Bank. I was shopping for a Jeep probably four years ago now and used social media and used every mechanism possible to say, "I'm buying a car." And I was thinking, "What banks are going to respond? Who's going to realize I'm in the market?" Well, as you can imagine, every dealer, every manufacturer was all over me going, "Buy ours, buy ours, buy ours." And only one financial institution said, "We'd like to help you reach your goal of wanting to buy a car."

I even wrote a check on my personal bank for the down payment knowing that this is a big bank that's doing scanning of checks and they still did not respond. What is interesting, while I didn't go the path that would be most likely was just directly Ally, it just so happened that when I went to the floor plan, it was still Ally who had my business. When I look at your career, you have I think 25 years, 15 years at Ally, and before that you were with an agency. It's a big question, but over this long period of time, what has changed in marketing and advertising and most important, branding?

Andrea Brimmer:

Yeah, my team and I talk about this all the time, I would say that marketing has probably changed more in the last five years than probably in the hundred years that preceded that. And a lot of that has to do with just a number of confluences of events that have occurred. One, I would say certainly digital acceleration of everything, and COVID definitely had even an amplifying effect on that, emergence of new technologies, whether it's VR, AR, social media platforms, just all different ways that consumers can utilize technology to interact with brands. I would say the power that the consumer has, which is very different than when we started in the business. We used to kind of invite ourselves into the consumer's living room, so to speak, and now the consumer has to invite us into their lives.

Jim Marous:

And they'll be more than happy to kick you out also.

Andrea Brimmer:

Completely, and to share their opinion about what you should do, what you shouldn't do, what the customer experience was. So, that has been certainly a massive change in terms of the industry. And then I would say another big one is just this whole hyper-personalization, and to kind of your point, trying to thread the needle between delivering the right level of personalization that consumers expect and not stepping over boundaries where it starts to get into territory that is too much and too invasive. And so all of those things have been massive changes in the business since I've started.

Jim Marous:

Yeah, it's interesting because Ally is a digital brand in the financial services industry, is kind of like a neobank in that you offer the full range of services and have done for years. You're not a new entry to the marketplace. But as a marketer and a legacy... Well, I'll say a legacy marketer, we talk about embracing change and taking the risks and disrupting yourself and your organization. How do you stay on top of everything that's going on in the marketplace, but more importantly all the tools that are at your disposal in the marketing field/

Andrea Brimmer:

It became really apparent to me when I got this job as CMO that the world was changing very quickly, and as a digitally native brand, that we had to at least be leading edge if not cutting edge. And that there was a certain expectation level that was required of us from the consumer relative to not only just the interaction or the experience with us, but also in terms of how we marketed and communicated to the consumer. And so I made a decision at that time that I was going to allocate at least a third of my time to an aggressive learning agenda. And I've really stuck to it over the years, whether it's going to conferences, whether it's reaching out to other brands that I admire, especially outside of the category and understanding how did you think about this, how have you done this?

I'm a voracious reader, I read a lot, especially the trade publications. Again, when I see things that are interesting to me, I'll either reach out to the reporter that wrote it or reach out to the brand that did it. I think just being in and of the media, consuming the media and understanding it. I'm not posting anything on Twitter, I'm not doing any dance videos, but I'm on it every single day seeing what people are doing.

Jim Marous:

It's a good learning tool.

Andrea Brimmer:

It's a great learning tool. So, it has really been that learning agenda that has been key. And then I think articulating the learnings internally at Ally and taking reasonable risks to test into some of these emerging platforms and technologies, so that we're ahead of it and not behind.

Jim Marous:

We talked about it before we went on the air, and one of the things that's really important to you, and you mentioned it, that your leadership really embraces investing, you use the word investing, in marketing and technology. And in the podcast we have found big differences in organizations really based on leadership. And if your leadership is willing to embrace the change that's happening and is going to reinvest in the tools available, it makes your job a whole lot easier, I'd imagine.

Andrea Brimmer:

It does. And I would tell you as a CMO, I think it's really important to try and shape the narrative properly internally because the reality is that it's very easy for a CFO to say marketing is an expense, but if you can demonstrate the value of marketing and really change the narrative around investment versus expense, which is something that we did a long time ago and have been very aligned across the entirety of the C-suite on. Make no mistake, I'm very lucky, I have a great CEO with JB, Jeff Brown, who believes very deeply in brand as a strategic asset to the company, investing in brand, growing brand, and really investing in marketing and technology as our two largest investments. I don't take that responsibility lightly. And we are really focused on the right KPIs to demonstrate like brand valuation that we're delivering the value back to the company and to shareholders.

Jim Marous:

On that subject, how-

Andrea Brimmer:

You bring it back to the company and the shareholders.

Jim Marous:

On that subject, how do you measure success in experiences because it's different now than it used to be. In experiences in engagement. How do you measure how much you're keeping that customer involved in the brand, because the last thing you want is somebody like me getting a car loan and that's it.

Andrea Brimmer:

Right. Well, so we've got a number of different teams within my organization that have very robust data and analytics. So we brought in all our digital marketing, both our planning and our buying with a very fullsome team that does all of our data and analytics. They've built an amazing platform where all of the marketers across my organization and communicators can real time be in the data looking at it. We've got a very significant amount of consumer research that we do on a pretty continual basis that emanates out of our product teams and we work very closely with them to understand that. We look at things like social sentiment very, very closely. I think that's a great proxy for the reality in real time that consumers are feeling. And so I've got an entire social community management team within my organization that's in the data and looking at the trending.

And interesting fact for you, our social media positive sentiment is in the plus 90% range. The financial services category averages in the mid to low thirties. So we're three times the category. And then the last thing, honestly, Jim, is brand valuation. So brand finance produces a brand valuation study every year. We always participate in that. When I took over this role, our brand valuation was 700 million. Last year it was two and a half billion. So we've had a pretty good runway. And I think that's one of the big factors that we use, especially when talking with the board about investment [inaudible 00:09:52] marketing.

Jim Marous:

It's interesting because people know what Ally is, they know who Ally is. But how you differentiate in a marketplace that's continually in flux where everybody's blasting out things digitally or non digitally out there and everybody seems to, if you kind of squint a little bit saying the same thing, I mean, how do you differentiate Ally and what is the process you say, here's what we have to do differently, then everybody else who's saying the same thing as we are.

Andrea Brimmer:

Yeah, I think the way we differentiate emanates out of deeds, not words, first and foremost. It's kind of like your Jeep story, right? I think for us it's doing things, not just saying things. And once you have a very differentiated customer experience that people are reliant on and can see and there's authenticity in it, then you have the latitude to make statements like, we're all better off with an ALLY or a tagline. Do it right. And I think the hallmark for us has always been this extreme bravery in marketing. We've always tried things, we've always been out there and I've never said I want our company to be the best financial services marketer. That's never been the challenge to the team. It's always been, I want to be...

Jim Marous:

[inaudible 00:11:07] set the bar very high sometimes.

Andrea Brimmer:

Yeah. I want to be one of the best marketers, any brand, period. And that's really the bar that we hold ourselves against. And I think in many regards we've achieved it, but it starts with the fact that we do things that are very different. And so it gives us a lot to talk about in terms of values of the brand.

Jim Marous:

[inaudible 00:11:27] you talk about the differentiation. You had a recent interview with our team at the financial brand, and one of the topics you talked about is that you use levity. I mean you use, I wouldn't say humor exactly, but real slice of life, humorous segments to talk about how you can reinforce that we want to be your ally. How is that decision made in a COVID environment where things are pretty serious?

Andrea Brimmer:

Yeah, I think we've always been a brand that's had a clever wit and we wanted to connect. We've always connected emotionally with people. I am a big believer that we fall in love with brands for reasons that we can't explain. It's an emotional purchase. I mean, why do we buy things that cost 10x what the next closest competitor might? Because a brand says something about you, it's a reflection of who you are and what you are about. And so I think connecting on a deep emotional level has always been really important to us.

And during COVID, we really took a little bit of a step back and said, we've been a pretty aggressive brand relative to kind of taking on the banking category. People really weren't in the mood for brands to fight one another. And instead, I think we started to take on this tone of, let's talk about what's important to you right now in this moment in time. And that's people coming together, that's having an ally, that's having somebody have your back. That's great stories about the way that we're coming together. And that really was a pivotal shift that we made that led us to better off with an ally.

Jim Marous:

It's interesting. Part of the elements that you have to deal with is you have products and I talk quite a bit about the fact that a lot of organizations say they're going into digital banking, they're doing digital banking transformation, but then when you try to open an account, it takes 15 minutes and you go, that's faking digital. How do you work with your product team to make sure that they're able to deliver against what you're saying?

Andrea Brimmer:

Well, we have a pretty unique process at Ally. So first of all, because we've always been digitally native, it's just in our ethos, we have something called TM Studios, which is an off-property innovation lab. And we do really rapid prototype innovation there. And what's really cool about it is that the teams go out... That it's empathetic based learning. And so the teams go out, really out onto the streets and they talk to people about pain points that they have in their financial experiences. And then they come back into the studio and they ideate around that. And then they have a week to come to an innovation. And then we do rapid prototype testing on that. And then once it gets cleared for approval, it goes back into ALLY proper, into our technology team for execution. And so I think just that spirit of innovation is such-

Jim Marous:

It sounds like it's an iteration as well. It's not like the next big thing.

Andrea Brimmer:

Right, exactly. And so a good example of that is our savings tools. We've always had a great savings account, but with our savings tool, the insight was many people said, I'm saving for a variety of things and I have to open multiple savings accounts, a wedding account, a car account, a vacation account. So instead, when we heard that what we created was our smart savings tools, and now you open one savings account, but you can create multiple buckets within that, label those buckets. And then for me, think about that. That's a wealth of data. So now I've got two and a half million consumer buckets that have been created [inaudible 00:15:01] ally and I can look at Jim and say, Jim's saving for his next new car and he's ready to get out of his Jeep because I see that in his bucket, and I can deliver you the right types of content that can help you get there. So it's this amazing ecosystem of an innovation that threads through product ideation through technology delivery, to a marketing execution.

Jim Marous:

Well, it's interesting is a lot of relationships at Ally are started from the loan side, and you don't get a whole lot of data from that as much you would get from a checking account or a credit card or debit card, but your buckets. It's interesting [inaudible 00:15:34] I'm just thinking about that, it's like the old envelope system that I grew up with at my family and everybody [inaudible 00:15:40] this is the putt-putt night or whatever it may be. But as you're learning more, that's a learning tool. And that allows you, I would imagine, to really be there when the customer wants you to be there proactively and reminding them, by the way, you're falling off your goal.

Andrea Brimmer:

And the other thing that we do is we've got a whole surprise and delight strategy. So oftentimes what we do is when people are close to their goal, we'll drop some money in their account and congratulate them.

Andrea Brimmer:

... are close to their goal, we'll drop some money in their account and congratulate them. We are big believers in, from a CRM perspective, not just pushing product at you all the time, and oftentimes using CRM to deliver you content. Or one of the strategies that we've got within CRM is we will shoot you an email and say, "Jim, you're doing a great job. You're $500 within your goal. Don't give up. Keep going." So we recognize what you are saving for and we encourage you. And now we've created a badge system so that once you hit your savings goal, you can take a badge and put it on your social media site. Again, it's like creating this human relationship.

Jim Marous:

An ally.

Andrea Brimmer:

Yeah, an ally. Exactly. Not just pushing product down people's throats all the time.

Jim Marous:

So let's take a quick break right now and recognize the sponsor of the podcast.

Welcome back to Banking Transformed. I'm joined today by Andrea Brimmer, the Chief Marketing and PR Officer at Ally Bank. We've been discussing how Ally Bank is standing out in a marketplace that's completely involved with a lot of finance institutions all saying somewhat the same thing.

So Andrea, we discuss your personal journey and how the introduction of a strong brand message at Ally Bank is so important. And I wondered, when you look at what you do on a daily basis, how do you determine the channels to use in a marketplace where there's never enough money?

Andrea Brimmer:

No, there's not. And it's the most complex media ecosystem we've ever seen in our time. You think about even just, you look at the proliferation, even within CTV and all of the different choices that consumers have, and so many of them in an ad-free model where you can't even reach them. That is a whole nother conundrum.

So I think for us, look, we put in a tool called multi-touch attribution, and we now have the ability to measure the contribution of every channel relative to its conversion rate. And we are optimizing into the best channels for us all the time. We have a strategy that is really built around what we call visibility, continuity, and fluidity. And the visibility is really those big medium moments that keeps Ally in front of people. So think about things like an Adele concert special or Big Bowl games or those kinds of things, or sponsoring something like Welcome to Wrexham in the CTV space.

And then the continuity is what are the channels that we have to be in to be where the consumer is actually shopping for our product to help drive them further down the funnel? Largely, those tend to be digital and social channels. And then the fluidity is having a little pot of money so when those last-minute big opportunities come through that you've got some flexibility to get into that.

And that's really helped us. We're at our highest awareness level in the history of our company right now. We're at our highest level of consideration in the history of our company right now, and we've reduced our media volatility by over 50%. So strategies really helped us in terms of being a great bedrock to go back to.

Jim Marous:

So I know you use agencies as every large organization does. But in the banking world, there's a lot of providers out there that are the best in their little segment of what you do. Do you build most of what you do in a marketing and a product area internally, or do you also use partners outside of Ally to make you the best of the certain things that it's just sometimes hard to be the best at everything?

Andrea Brimmer:

Yeah, a combination. I came from the agency world, so I'm a big believer in the agency model and a big believer in the power of what agencies do better than in-house work. So in-house we've got digital planning and buying. We've got all of our content creation is in-house. A lot of our data and analytics is in-house. All of our creative is really external. So we use Anomaly in New York, who's one of the best in the business as our lead creative agency. MediaCom we use for our media agency. And then we've got translation, which is really more of what we call our cultural and diversity agency. They've done a lot of great work for us in that space. And MKTG who we use for our sports marketing, which we've built out a really big footprint.

But I really think it's build core competencies that are going to give you the best ability for speed to market, differentiation, and the best ability to own your own data and analytics. And so that's what we've done internally. And then use external agencies that are best in breed that are going to have a much larger ability to be closer to the consumer than you do, just because of the breadth and the depth of the staff they have.

Jim Marous:

It's interesting. We've seen a lot of situations where a lot of FinTech firms right now are not getting the funding, but that's more of an economic decision. We've also seen some very major brands that try to get into banking, and they found a lot harder than they thought it was going to be. And we can name some companies.

How does Ally continue to try to become that core provider in a marketplace that people have a very long memory and a very short patience now for things that aren't going their way? How do you make sure that they put you in the decision set of who to go to, but on the other hand, for customers you already have, how they don't look elsewhere?

Andrea Brimmer:

Yeah. I think it's this maniacal focus on a customer obsession. And if you think about when we launched, we launched and we were very different at the time than anybody in the financial services category. And that was the whole premise of the birth of Ally, was to solve for customer pain points in a category that largely didn't care about customer pain points for the hundred years ...

Jim Marous:

Commodity, yeah.

Andrea Brimmer:

Right, very commoditized, but also I think a category that felt like the consumer had no other choice. So where were they going to go? And that was really the premise of Ally was they do have a choice, and instead of being apathetic about your money, you should be emotional about your money. It's your most important asset in your life. And so this maniacal focus on solving for customer pain points and then obsessing over the customer on a consistent basis, I think is really how we've differentiated ourself.

And then from a marketing perspective, I think what we've done is we've engaged people on an emotional level by making money a safe conversation. Money's a daunting conversation. Most people don't want to have it. And so whether it's using gamification to teach you about financial literacy, whether it's building worlds in Minecraft for middle school aged kids to learn about money, or turning six cities in America into giant live monopoly games so people could ... Hasbro reached out to us and said, "Congratulations, in our hundred year history, you're the first bank that figured out we're a game about banking." Right?

Jim Marous:

Yeah.

Andrea Brimmer:

And so doing those unique things that take banking, which is kind of a boring and daunting category for people you want to interact with-

Jim Marous:

Something you have to do, not want to do, yeah.

Andrea Brimmer:

And make it fun and make it engaging. And that's been the secret sauce.

Jim Marous:

Well, it's interesting because you just described a whole lot of entity. None of them are sales.

Andrea Brimmer:

No.

Jim Marous:

They're building engagement, which I talk about quite a bit on the show, that basically we talk about customer experiences. That's more like satisfaction. It's little, yes, we want to have a good experience rating. At the end of the day though, we want people to come back to our site over and over again because we're providing them value, not because they have to.

Andrea Brimmer:

Right.

Jim Marous:

Because they want to. What is your today, what is the biggest challenge that you face at the head of marketing of a very major finance entity that seems to me on the cutting edge, but you pull back through, say, well, it's not all that good things and roses, but I'm just wondering, what's the biggest challenge that you have today?

Andrea Brimmer:

I would say the relentless competitive ...

Andrea Brimmer:

I would say the relentless competitive landscape and the massive tech investment that goes into the big money-center banks, as well as a lot of the fintechs. The pace of competition is staggering. A number of new entrants. We sit in this really interesting space. You've got the big money-center banks over here, that are definitely very different than Ally, but have really good digital chops.

Jim Marous:

Big pots of gold.

Andrea Brimmer:

And big pockets. Right?

Jim Marous:

Yeah.

Andrea Brimmer:

You've got the fintechs that are over here, that are really more focused in one area or another area. They don't have the totality of full-scale financial services. And then you have us, that kind of sits in the middle. That's full-scale digital financial services that feel more like the fintechs, but have the entire portfolio and experience of the big money-center banks. So we sometimes get squeezed in the middle of, "These guys do a lot of really good stuff when it comes to technology. These guys can outspend us 10X, if they really want to, in a certain space." So how do we just stay consistent, persistent, leading-edge, engaging, and really continue to obsess over the customer and create that point of differentiation? That's the biggest challenge.

Jim Marous:

So, we sit down here three years from now. How's Ally going to be different than it's today?

Andrea Brimmer:

I think that there are a lot of spaces, like metaverse, web ... Not even Web 3.0, but Web 2.5, and where that's going, and how that will impact customer experience. I think that will probably be an area where we'll be different. I think a much broader digital tool set than we have today, building on the success of things like those savings buckets that I talked about. There's a lot of new tools that are coming out that I can't talk about yet, but are really differentiated and will be really significantly different for us. I would say I would have to think there's going to be, again, more massive change in terms of the media landscape. So, potentially even the way that we go to market will be very different. And then even just in our biggest businesses. You look at the emergence of things like EV, direct-to-consumer lending, what's going to happen in the dealer space over time. Those will probably be all pockets of differences that we'll have to evolve towards.

Jim Marous:

Job that's never done.

Andrea Brimmer:

No, it's not. No sleeping in this job.

Jim Marous:

Yeah. So, we have quite a few listers of all sides of organizations. You're an observer of the marketplace from a standpoint of who your competitors are and what they're doing. What one suggestion do you give a financial marketer who may be not on the cutting edge, but on the start of that? What should they focus on in 2023 more than anything else?

Andrea Brimmer:

Well, what I would say is, focus on what's authentic to your brand and to your company. I think too often marketers try and exploit an area that is not authentic to them, and it gets them down a path that leads them to just a pray-and-spray type of strategy. So really zero-in on, what's your real value proposition? What's your true point of differentiation? What is really authentic to you, and then what's the best way that you can bring that to life? You don't have to have big budgets. Look, our share of voice compared to the money-center banks in terms of pure spend is 2%. So, we've been duking it out pretty well in terms of-

Jim Marous:

Out-punching your weight.

Andrea Brimmer:

Yeah. Exactly. And we talk about that all the time. Punch above our weight. That's been a big part of our strategy. So I would tell people, "Focus on that. What's authentic to you? What feels true to your value proposition in your brand, and where can you really outperform everybody else? Just focus on that, and go at it, and go at it, and go at it.

Jim Marous:

And I'm going to go back to the very first thing you said, "And keep learning."

Andrea Brimmer:

Absolutely.

Jim Marous:

We take it for granted, but if you keep on doing what you've done in the past, you're going to keep on getting the results you've had in the past. And that's not going to be acceptable in today's marketplace.

Andrea Brimmer:

No, and sometimes you have to resist temptation. There are times where the latest flashy technology thing comes out, and you're like, "Oh, I got to rush to that and jump in." But you can also rush to failure, and I think you've got to really step back. This is a space where consumers will figure you out, if you're pretending, faster than any place. So you've got to step back, really understand the space. What's your value that you're going to bring to somebody by being there? That's one of the big things we've thought a lot about. What's the value we're going to bring to somebody by jumping into the metaverse? And if we don't have a well-constructed strategy around what that value proposition is, there's no point to just jump in for the sake of being able to say, "Oh, we were one of the first banks in the metaverse." Nobody cares.

Jim Marous:

Right.

Andrea Brimmer:

But when you're giving somebody a value and there's that exchange, that's when you get to what I call marketing gold. So, that would be another one. Resist temptation to go towards the shiny objects.

Jim Marous:

Andrea, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been a pleasure, because what's interesting is, you really are combining legacy thinking with modern technology and modern capabilities. And Ally being what I'll call a legacy digital bank, which is hard to put those words together. But it really is.

Andrea Brimmer:

Right.

Jim Marous:

It's interesting, because you have some of the same challenges. You're not going to beat the big banks at spending. It's finding those pockets of opportunity.

Andrea Brimmer:

Absolutely. It's a pleasure to be on. Thank you for having me.

Jim Marous:

Oh, thank you so much.

Andrea Brimmer:

I appreciate it.

Jim Marous:

Appreciate that. Thanks.

Andrea Brimmer:

Thank you.

Jim Marous:

Thanks for listening to Banking Transformed, the winner of three international awards for podcast excellence. If you enjoyed today's interview, please be sure to take some time and give our show a five-star review. Also, be sure to catch my recent articles on The Financial Brand and the research we're doing for the Digital Banking Report. This has been a production of Evergreen Podcasts. A special thank you to our producer, Leah Haslage, audio engineer Dave Douglas and Sean Rule Hoffman, and video producer Will Pritts. I'm your host, Jim Marous. Until next time, remember, consumers and small businesses aren't looking for products. They're looking for a partner trying to reach their goals in a really confusing financial marketplace.