MIAMI — It’s one of the biggest brands on the block. But, when Bank Of America needed to market a new kind of investment service, it turned to a new kind of advertising.
Merrill Edge is BoA’s investment platform for customers that like to control their own investments.
And Andrew Deming, BoA’s media leader, says the company needed a fresh approach, to become more “relationship-driven”.
“We’re shifting from being product-led and everything revolving around the credit card or an investment or a home loan, and it really being more focused on what is right for this audience,” Deming tells Beet.TV in this panel interview.
“The traditional mindset of mass marketing … is all about the product value prop. And that just doesn’t work anymore for everything. We’re trying to get away from designing for a product and delivering to the masses and really designing for an audience and delivering to individuals.”
The main problem was, Bank Of America was only reaching 15% to 20% of intended audience. So the company turned to addressable TV advertising, with a nine-week campaign delivered by Starcom Mediavest Group to re-use an existing piece of TV creative.
Deming says the Merrill Edge campaign was able to reach a smaller but more relevant audience than with mass TV advertising.
So what were the proof points of the campaign? Deming cites multiple returns on investment:
- Bigger reach: “We were able to more than double the frequency on a monthly basis that we’ve been able to do with a national TV campaign.”
- Cheaper: “A fraction of the cost of what we were spending on national television.
- Uplift: “We saw some really strong attitudinal lifts.”
- Recall: “The test group actually had 24% higher recall than the control group.”
- Reputation: “We really saw upwards of 30% lifts in trustworthiness … their brand impression was up 15 points over the control group.”
Dan Bruinsma, SMG’s media activation lead on the group’s Bank Of America account, says he would like to see more dynamic audience segments buildable with addressable TV.
This panel was moderated by Tracey Scheppach, CEO of Matter More Media.
This panel was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
