I hadn’t either, until a couple of days ago. The thing is reaching young consumers with advertising messages is getting really difficult. They have such tight control over what they watch, read, and see. They get their news from John Stewart, via podcast. They TIVO their TV shows, and watch whenever they want, without the commercials. They listen to digital satellite radio. It’s like trying to reach somebody wearing blinders and earplugs. So what do you do?

Well, they like to play games. So you can reach them via interactive promotions in which they get to participate. We’ve been doing a some work with mixed media programs using text-message technology as an opt-in medium. They opt in via text. Then you have their text number and permission to use it. You can then start a conversation via text, which is their preferred way of communicating…sort of like database direct marketing at light speed. We’re still learning about it, so I’ll keep you posted.

All of this brings me to “bluejacking.” Seth informed me the other day that we have the capability to “bluejack.”

“Whoa,“ I said. ”Don’t know what that is but it sounds cool.”

Turns out that you can broadcast an open audio signal directly into people’s Blue Tooth receivers. Now, I definitely wouldn’t like that, but then I wouldn’t be wearing an ear piece with a flashing blue light on it. To people who do, anything that makes the light flash (thus making them look connected and busy) is great. So to a certain sub-segment of the Blue Tooth demo, you can light them up with a commercial message, and they’ll dig it, because it makes them look cool.

Marketing communication is getting scary.

Well, you have if you’re a bank marketer. UMPQUA Bank is an Oregon bank that has put the “retail” into retail banking in a big way. They call their branches “stores.” They actually sell stuff in there. They open the stores up to public meetings, serve coffee to people hanging out there, and generally position themselves as the greatest bank in the world. They’ve taken guerrilla marketing and word of mouth to the limit also. They have an ice cream truck, which they take around to the markets they serve, passing out free ice cream. Everybody loves UMPQUA. Does everybody bank there?

Well, they’ve had impressive growth over the past 15 years or so. But they’ve also had some mergers and acquisitions, which means there is growth that cannot be tracked to their extreme likability. But they seem to be the flavor of the month in bank marketing. And as long as they’re having good ideas, and as long as their good ideas of being covered in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, let’s check it out and steal with impunity.

Just got back from the ABA Marketing Conference. Here are a few quick thoughts.
• Bank marketers are under greater pressure than other types of marketers to show a Return on Investment for their marketing spend—but it’s something all marketers face.
• Even the super quantitative people who CAN track and report ROI on promotional programs can’t track ROI on brand marketing.
• Selling to the top requires a way of thinking that is unconventional for bankers.

To help sell marketing ideas to non-marketers (something we do every day in the ad biz), I suggest that you prepare for the presentation by making crib notes answering the following questions:
What difference will this idea make?
How will this idea work?
Why will people love it, and who will love it?
And why is it cool?

This covers all the thinking styles…CEO, COO/CFO, Sales and HR, and Marketing.

Bank marketing is about to get a lot more sophisticated. I was around bank marketers for four days. And I can just feel it.

We’ve been doing marketing for banks since we started, back in 1994. Before that, I worked on many, many, many banks. In fact, the very first advertising assignment I had was for Equibank, in Pittsburgh, back in the 1980s. Very retail!

Anyhow, I’ve always had this question. Maybe somebody can help me with this. It appears to me that the key to bank success is cross-sell ratio. I’ve observed that just about every bank measures this. Many complain about how theirs is too low, or boast to the boss that while theirs is lower than they’d like, it’s still higher than the national average. But, with the possible exception of the re-structuring of Wachovia’s marketing department back in the early 1990s, I’ve never really seen a bank DO anything about it. So my question for senior bank marketing people is, do you really care about cross sell? If so, why don’t you focus more resources on it?

It seems obvious that in a relationship business like banking, the longer relationships last (loyalty) and the more services/touch points each relationship represents, the more profitable the bank will be. Is that not the case? In package goods land, where I spent a good part of the formative years of my career, a high-leverage KOI (key operating indicator) like this would not only be a thing, but it would be the thing. Cross sell seems like it should be as important to banks as driving trial and accelerating usage cycles is to package goods.

I suspect the problem is that marketing was anathema to banking for so long. Then, as banks started to dabble in marketing, they never got much past the awareness (image) phase. Because there were relatively few banks in any given market, there was always lots of low-hanging fruit. Suddenly, times have changed. I envision a time, sooner rather than later, when banks will need to focus on…

• attracting the right customers, and discouraging the wrong ones (depending on the bank’s business model)
• expanding all current relationships through cross sell (grow profits from the current customer base, not from customer acquisition)
• working to identify and retain the most profitable 20-50 percent of customers (through loyalty/retention tactics).

Two out of three of these are related, and can be affected by cross selling. Which gets me back to my original question.

We’re getting ready to go to the ABA Marketing Conference. We’ve been putting materials together that we think might be of interest to bank marketers, that we think might get the attention of bank marketers, that we think might engage bank marketers in a fun way. We’ve also been talking a lot about our credentials and accomplishments, in a way that will help us present them to bankers—the old elevator speech exercise.

Bank—Marketer. Seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it. That’s what makes this such a puzzle. And such a fun challenge. We’ve worked with a lot of bank marketers. The best of them are true marketers. AND true bankers.

I confess that I’ve never been in a room with 600 bank marketers. It’ll be a blast. Us getting to know them. Them getting to know us.

Since we’re kinda shy, we’ll probably start by catching up with some of our old friends from Riverside Bank, LegacyTexas Bank, Palmetto Bank, and County Bank.