Inside Marketing: Smarter digital ad buys

With the rise of digital media, buying advertising for a CU has become more complicated. “Digital marketing has just begun, but it’s evolving rapidly,” notes Brian Ley, founder of machine-learning fintech Alpharank, based in Redwood City, California. “Megabanks are pumping $100 million a year into reaching customers with digital marketing.” How can CUs hope to keep up?

Suncoast Credit Union has an answer. “Machine learning has become an important part of our marketing process,” reports Patti Barrow, VP/marketing at the $9.2 billion CU based in Tampa, Florida. “We use this technology for each of our marketing campaigns that include digital display ad buys. These buys are placed programmatically through a demand-side platform that uses machine algorithms to monitor campaign performance continuously in order to optimize the delivery and effectiveness of ads. That helps us meet our campaign goals.” Digital ad buys represented just under 20 percent of Suncoast CU’s media budget in 2018—a number she expects to increase substantially in 2019 and beyond.

Veridian Credit Union also has an answer. The $4 billion CU, based in Waterloo, Iowa, wanted to bring the promise of machine learning and artificial intelligence to boost its advertising strategy, reports JoEllen Zmolek Nyquist, product marketing strategist. “As we expanded digitally, we wanted to see across all channels what was working well and what was not,” she explains. “We wanted a comprehensive game plan that took advantage of all the relevant data and used statistical models to simulate the member journey instead of making discrete media buys and trying to track results for each particular buy.

 

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