The Programmatic Playbook for Financial Brands

Catch the Key Takeaways

The world of programmatic media is moving fast — and financial brands that want to grow can’t afford to fall behind.

That’s why Amsive’s latest webinar brought together experts from Amsive and The Trade Desk to spotlight where the channel is headed, and how banks and credit unions can navigate this complexity to win. From shifts in customer behavior to the rise of retail media, they didn’t just talk trends — they broke down the moves financial marketers need to make right now.

Here are the top five takeaways from the conversation:

It’s time to reconfigure your digital media mix.

Financial marketers can no longer treat programmatic as a “nice to have.” It’s a must. But it has to be done right — with the right audience strategy, targeting precision, and creative approach.

One big shift? Moving away from a static, fixed budget across siloed channels. Today’s top performers are using audience-first strategies that continuously adapt in real time — optimizing based on results, not just reach.

There’s a smarter, compliant way to target financial services.

With increasing regulations and data privacy concerns, it’s easy to assume targeting is getting harder. In reality, it’s getting better — for marketers who know how to work with smarter segmentation, predictive modeling, and privacy-first data platforms.

Retail data may be a financial marketer’s secret weapon.

Retail media isn’t just for retail brands. Financial institutions can leverage these networks to reach high-intent audiences at key decision points — if they know how to activate with purpose.

From co-branded targeting opportunities to aligning creative with consumer mindset, the opportunity is real. But it requires deep channel fluency, smart buying, and agile creative testing.

Good creative is the difference between a new customer and a missed opportunity.

Even with the best data and smartest strategies, your creative still needs to resonate to reach your best audience. For banks and credit unions, that means crafting messages that feel both personalized and compliant — a tricky balance that many brands still struggle to get right.

Powerful, dynamic creative that reflects real-life financial goals can build trust, and evolve with each customer interaction.

Proving ROI starts with smarter measurement.

Many FIs are under pressure to show media impact beyond impressions and clicks. Modern marketing performance means connecting media to deposits, loans, account growth — and ultimately LTV.

With tools like incrementality testing, full-funnel attribution, and custom audience measurement strategies, marketers can finally get the visibility they need to invest with confidence.

To stay ahead, financial brands must embrace a dynamic, data-driven approach that not only reacts to change but anticipates it.

Dive into the Transcript

Introduction

Allison Wilson (00:07):

Welcome, welcome all. So excited to be here today. My name’s Allison Wilson and I lead the financial services practice within customer experience at Amsive, and I’m excited to be here with some friends and colleagues talking about really the programmatic playbook for financial brands. And I will tell you this format while we’ve got slides up is much more conversational. It’s basically you listening in to me and Michael and Laurin’s conversation.

We hope you find it valuable, but another way that you can really make the highest and best use of this time because we know your time is super valuable is we have Q and A. So as we’re talking, if you have questions that are burning in your mind, go ahead and just drop the question in the Q and A and we’re really going to try to make sure that we save some time at the end to hit as many of those questions as we possibly can.

In light of time and in sake of time, we’re just going to go ahead and get started and I’d love to introduce you to my friends on the phone. So I’ll start with Laurin. She’s one of our Senior Directors of Digital Media. Laurin and I go way back. I’m excited to have her on because she has a ton of experience really across the globe and across verticals, but she really does have a lot of experience while across a lot of verticals, deep in financial services, and I can’t help myself but share a fun fact about Laurin Bobo. Laurin Bobo.

For those that you do not know this about her competitive beach volleyball player, she may or may not have spent 50 hours in the last week playing competitive beach volleyball. So fun fact, if you’re into beach volleyball or just interested in a fitness change, go ahead and give Laurin Bobo a call.

Also with me is a partner from The Trade Desk and Michael has a ton of experience in the programmatic ecosystem, but part of the reason we at Amsive love partnering with The Trade Desk is they are data-driven omnichannel marketers, just like we are so excited to have Michael and the breadth and depth of experience that he has from a programmatic experience on the conversation today.

And a fun fact about Michael is Michael’s in the new dad club, so for any of you that are parents out there, you just drop in the Q and A. Some tips for Michael, I feel like I can claim that too, although I have a 15-month-old, so I don’t know if I can be the new club still.

But anyway, we’re really excited to dive into some q and a today on programmatic, so I feel like we got to set the stage here and I know that there are varying degrees of people with varying degrees of understanding of programmatic. So just to set the stage, Michael, my first question to you, given look at all these stats on the slide, people are inundated, right?

So we all experience programmatic advertising as individuals, but can you just give a little bit of an overview of the financial services landscape in programmatic? What’s going on today?

The Financial Services Programmatic Landscape

Michael Garson (03:12):

Yeah, I think that we can all agree that the only thing that’s guaranteed every year is that change is going to be constant. Something we’ve seen over the years is consumer’s journeys continue to get more and more fragmented, and we can think of it even from our own perspective. You’re not actively thinking about all these different platforms you’re interacting with, but you are seamlessly throughout the day.

And I think one of the best changes that advertisers and financial institutions can make is instead of thinking about channel by channel to really think holistically through an omnichannel lens, just as consumers are experiencing it seamlessly, marketers should also adapt and view their plans holistically so that they can gain the insights from all the different channels that’s going to drive better experiences, which ultimately is going to drive better outcomes.

Allison Wilson (04:10):

Yeah, no, I love that and I feel like that’s part of the reason we love working with you guys is just a similar approach, this journey that our consumers are on, how can we meet them in the spaces and places where they operate? I’m going to jump over to Laurin now and pick her brain because we talk about just setting the stage.

I think sometimes we get into execution mindset and we’re just running ads, but when you think, Laurin, from your experience, why is it so crucial for financial institutions to have a smarter approach to running programmatic as opposed to just like, yep, we’re running our ads out in the ecosystem.

Laurin Bobo (04:50):

I mean, running ads alone, just like you’re saying, it’s not enough anymore, especially with financial brands who have very balance sheet-minded stakeholders, we have to be able to prove ROI and use data to prove effectiveness of some of these upper funnel channels, especially when they’re may be not the last touch in that buying cycle.

Somebody might not be getting a mortgage immediately after hearing an audio ad, but being able to tie impressions and upper funnel channels to down funnel conversion metrics such as those on search or even meta, allows us to give some insight to convince those balance sheet minded stakeholders that these channels are driving measurable results.

So making sure that we’ve got accountability performance data and especially with a partner like The Trade Desk who offers so much more flexibility and control and especially brand safety over some of our other giants like Meta and Google in the space, it’s so crucial that financial brands are leaning in, especially as we navigate strict compliance regulations, which I’m sure we’re going to talk a lot about today.

Allison Wilson (05:55):

I know I’m tempted to go there next, but why would we go to compliance when we don’t have to early on, we won’t go there. But yeah, I do appreciate Laurin, the comment on we’re dealing with balance sheet minded folks and we have to show and it’s numbers, we have to pivot the mindset from marketing’s just a cost center where we’re just throwing ads out to show no, no, no, marketing’s a profit center. This is how we’re driving performance.

Laurin Bobo (06:23):

Absolutely.

Leveraging Data for Optimization: First- and Third-Party Approaches

Allison Wilson (06:25):

Well, I feel like at least high level we set the stage on programmatic and what’s going on and why is it important. I think when we talk about how do we really create that playbook that’s super effective, it comes back to data and it comes back to the audience. So Laurin, in your experience, financial institutions just have a wealth of first party data. What have you seen? How can really they leverage this information to optimize performance?

Laurin Bobo (06:56):

There’s a couple of buckets in it really, but you’re so right. Financial institutions are sitting on a gold mine of first party data that we can use to be better in our advertising, both on our end but also for consumer’s sakes as well. We really want to meet customers where they are but also do so with precision, making sure that we’re not serving too many impressions where our customers are not wasting impressions just in general. Eliminating waste allows us to meet our customers where they’re at, making sure that we’re using first party data to create highly targeted and compliant audience segments, and then using tools within The Trade Desk to make sure that we’re scaling reach without sacrificing that accuracy are really key.

We tend to talk a lot about a first party approach or an audience first approach, and especially a first party audience, first approach being really key to make sure that we’re not wasting impressions and also making sure that we’re using first party data to inform our creative and channel strategies to make sure that we’re being personalized where we can, this is a big one, consumers want personalized advertising. The data’s there, so making sure that we’re talking to them the way they want to be talked about.

Allison Wilson (08:08):

Yeah, it’s funny, when I saw this stat, I would really like to meet the 21% of North American leaders who said that financial data intelligence isn’t critical to success. Who are those people? Because yeah, you just see this first party data and I think we probably got to dive into third party data too because I know there are some folks who that’s a little scary or maybe your first party data isn’t in a place that you feel like you can really use it. You can’t really trust it because it’s all siloed sitting in different areas. I don’t know.

I’ll kick over to Michael now and just kind of talk about, hey, well, Laurin and I both love us some first party data. Can you talk a little bit about third party data and how you see that enhancing efforts? And in light of all of this, gosh, I feel like every other day we’re hearing different things about the privacy landscape and I know we’ve got some folks on the phone from California and that’s different than other places. So anyway, can you just talk a little bit, Michael, about third party data and the role you see at playing, making a really good playbook for programmatic?

Michael Garson (09:14):

Yes, of course. I guess this is a good time to also plug that this is not legal advice.

Allison Wilson (09:20):

Good call out, Michael.

Michael Garson (09:21):

But I would say that when thinking about, I liked what Laurin said, you want to always start with first party data. You want that to inform all of the data you use and often third party data helps to compliment that to also expand reach to new customers across different channels. When I think of third party data, something that’s really important to think of is that not all data is created equal, should make common sense.

And when you ask yourself, where’s this data coming from? And then obviously you should work with your compliance and legal teams to ensure that everything is working and work with Amsive and partners like The Trade Desk so that you can have collaborative strategies on how to best test and learn different audiences to drive incremental reach. I think one example of where this is really relevant is retail data. It’s a very hot topic right now and I think it’s reason. So when I think of financial brands, a lot of the times people may say, oh, well that’s only for people who are selling products in those stores, but retail data offers you the ability to also stand out and reach these high intent audiences where it may not be as popular within the financial vertical to do so.

Allison Wilson (10:42):

Yeah, and can you talk a little bit more about that retail data? Can you dig in just a layer deeper on retail data of how we see that working? I was kind of thinking of things that we can do related to footfall traffic reports and understanding where people are going. I just want to throw out there just I think a lot of financial services marketers think, oh yeah, retail, we are retailers, we’re retailers of financial services products. But talk about where you see the white space there for financial institutions. I don’t know if that’s a question for Michael or Laurin. Either of y’all can take that.

Michael Garson (11:16):

I’m happy to start on that. So I think that when I think of the retail data, you’re right, it is so broad, but for example, within The Trade Desk we have a lot of retail partnerships in a lot more retailers and eCommerce companies are continuing to bring their data into programmatic to make it easier to test improve performance. So I like to think of it as, for example, I’m a new dad, so my shopping behavior, while you think of general third party audiences, they’re still great, but retailers like a Walmart or a Target, they know exactly this life stage I’m in because I am voting with my dollars by changing my shopping behavior.

So that gives them the ability to create these highly relevant audiences based off of my purchase behavior that advertisers can tap into if they’re going after different life stages for insurance or whatever it is.

Laurin Bobo (12:07):

Yeah.

Allison Wilson (12:08):

I love that.

Laurin Bobo (12:09):

Allison, you talked about foot traffic and where people are going out in the world, same kind of audience segment. A good metric is something like a new mover audience. We tend to see that being a big time, a big signal for a financial brand to start advertising. We tend to see that when someone moves, they tend to start shopping for a new bank. So hitting somebody based on where they’re going out in the world, are they going to different places that indicate that they’re going to be moving soon that can help us really start to target people in that white space.

Audience Strategy: Best Practices and Common Mistakes

Allison Wilson (12:41):

And it’s funny because myself as a consumer, my fun fact is I’m moving to Utah this summer, wahoo married to a military guy, so we’re moving and it’s funny because in market and I’m like, they know me, they know I’m moving and you do. That’s a wealth of information and if we can tap into that and leverage that effectively knowing look, regardless of your purchase behavior or where you’re going, we can leverage that to inform smarter targeting. It’s fun to talk about the cool smart stuff we can do, but I think one of the best ways we can learn is sometimes from mistakes.

So I’m debating who to give this to, I think I’ll give it to Laurin. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see when it comes to audience segmentation in particular? This would be the anti-playbook, this is what we shouldn’t do.

Laurin Bobo (13:32):

This is the “Not-to-Do List,” as some might say. I’ve got a couple. One is trying to find, I guess the mistake is not finding but the balance between overly broad and overly niche audiences. Platforms need a bit of data to rock and roll in the algorithm, so we can’t be too small in our audience targeting especially where compliance is concerned, but also making sure we’re not overly broad, making sure that we’re hitting our high value based on whatever that signal is from the financial institution, making sure that we’re being very targeted within that.

Another one is also just not refreshing audiences enough. It’s a pretty common mistake that we see an audience was pushed over, it was used in advertising and it hasn’t been updated in a year or two. And especially when you start to think about what those audiences could be, sometimes there’s something like somebody who’s in market for a mortgage two years ago, they’ve probably since bought a house, they’re no longer in market for a mortgage, so we’re just wasting money by advertising those people.

So making sure that we’re staying on top of our audiences, balancing broad and niche and lastly, making sure that as compliance needs evolve both within the brand but also within our platforms and our publishers, making sure that we’re staying updated on what segmentation is allowed but also what’s most important.

Allison Wilson (14:57):

No, and I love your call out on the whole overly broad or overly niche and it’s like we love living in these extremes and really the challenge and the art is living in that middle space

Laurin Bobo (15:11):

And it’s hard. It’s hard to find that balance.

Allison Wilson (15:13):

It’s so hard. It’s so hard, but I love that spectrum of I want to target everybody who breathes versus I want to target people who wear green shirts on Tuesdays and you’re like, that’s a pretty small segment, so how do we really drive performance? Yeah,

Michael Garson (15:30):

I think one thing to add that too that I always think of is you need to challenge those assumptions and try new things to drive new customers and stand out often a lot of financial advertisers or other banks within your area, they’re going to be targeting just general high intent people in market for these products. So how do you use that data to differentiate and test and learn new things and use those insights to inform future tests?

Allison Wilson (15:58):

Yeah, I love that. It’s always, we’d love to find that one silver bullet or two silver bullets, but at the end of the day it’s always this. Yes. And in marketing, yes, and this, yes and that as the ecosystem is just constantly evolving, how are we constantly evolving our audience strategy to capitalize on opportunity? Maybe in that zone, Michael, how do you see financial institutions really identifying and activating those high value audiences effectively in The Trade Desk? What do you see happening in that space? If we think Laurin answered the question of biggest mistakes, I guess the question to you is biggest opportunities, biggest successes in finding those high value audiences?

Michael Garson (16:43):

Yeah, I think this is so important for all marketers, but especially with financial institutions. So first it’s defining what is this high value action and what audience do we have? If we have a first party audience that looks like those consumers, I think historically a lot of people did lookalike modeling just to inform third party data. Where should we find our customers at The Trade Desk, we’ve really built this into every aspect of our platform through a product that we call seeds.

So you start with what is that seed? What is that most important audience that we have data on? If we don’t have first party data, which is ideally what we’ll build this off of, we can use third party data, but we want it to be whatever that high value audience looks like. And then before a campaign even starts, the platform will automatically look at what are the best audiences, times of day inventory sources and channels so that these campaigns can reach those high value audiences right out of the gate where traditionally may have needed some time for the algorithms to kick in to dry performance.

These insights are available right out of the gate with these new campaigns by using seeds and really factoring into that data into every decision we’re making when we’re setting up and optimizing campaigns.

Allison Wilson (18:06):

So it’s like I think I heard you say, Hey, first party data is gold, let’s use it. Hey, where we don’t, can we seed the data with third party insights? We can and we can get those insights faster. So love to have the best of both worlds. Leverage that first party data, leverage that first party data as a seed in the platform, but then also, hey, if we don’t have that, well then let’s use that third party data to create a little environment that then we can go find them in the spaces and places where they most are.

Allison Wilson (18:39):

Is that fair?

Michael Garson (18:40):

For sure. And I think it’s about using the first party data you have and there could be different products within a bank that have different first party data audiences or so it’s using that data that you have to inform which third party data resources are going to perform best. Through the predictive modeling we’re able to do based off that first party, we could then start strong and drive performance, not just on data, which I think has been around for a while, but across inventory and a lot of other variables to drive performance.

Allison Wilson (19:14):

Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s just as you see these technological changes happening at the speed of light, right? It’s like constantly the ecosystem is changing and what was new yesterday is very old as y’all are constantly evolving the platform. I feel like. Laurin, anything you wanted to add on audience stuff? I feel like we might should pivot to measurement, but I saw the infamous Laurin tilt of the microphone back down and I thought she wants to add something. I feel

Laurin Bobo (19:42):

I actually just muted myself to drink a water, then I had to unmute myself. But yes, it wasn’t me throwing the hammer down ready to contribute on that one. I think let’s talk measurement.

Allison Wilson (19:54):

Okay.

Laurin Bobo (19:54):

The fun stuff.

KPIs for Financial Marketers

Allison Wilson (19:55):

So I feel like Laurin set it up well with balance sheet minded folks and clearly a lot of driving performance starts with understanding that audience, but I feel like if we can understand that audience pretty quickly, the next question gets to be around measurement and I feel like I talked to clients the most about measurement and I guess my question probably is for Michael, but Laurin you can weigh in on this too. When you think about the KPIs financial marketers should focus on should being the optimal term here when measuring programmatic success, what do you see those KPIs being?

Michael Garson (20:40):

Yeah, so I think it’s completely related where on first party data, we talked about getting your first party data in a really good spot so you understand these different segments of converters. That’s also should be the question for the main goal of the campaign to come back to what are the actions we’re trying to drive that’s going to move our business forward and how do we determine success?

So by setting those goals, it’s going to then through measurement create those first party audiences. But in terms of the actual KPIs, I think lifetime value is a big one and by focusing on driving just quality converters, whatever that means for your business with the products you’re trying to offer.

So lifetime value is one that may be measured in outside sources, but a benefit of working with The Trade Desk who’s a very open platform in terms of working with partners and also being able to bring in and push out data is you can measure and optimize towards something like lifetime value, but then you also have to consider that while the end goal should always be at the forefront, each channel or step along a consumer’s journey could have a different value in driving that outcome.

So it’s about having the transparency into being able to set up to understand each of these touch points and then measure the KPIs across that and adjust those benchmarks and be flexible for something that’s an upper funnel first reach for a connected TV ad on March Madness versus after two weeks of engagement, someone is you’re reaching on search.

Obviously the cost per acquisition on those are going to be different based off the, so it’s really determining how do all these work together to drive something that’s going to drive a business outcome or a signup that’s still profitable for our business.

Laurin Bobo (22:34):

Well, and also just to add balancing like you’re talking about different products have different buying cycles, different CPAs of what’s reasonable, a mortgage looks very different of a buying cycle and also what a reasonable CPA or ROAS are than something like opening up a checking account. Those are very different or even an auto loan, those are very different things that we look at. So making sure that we’re not just picking one number to look at the end of the day or even not expecting everything to perform the same or in the same timeframe is really crucial.

Allison Wilson (23:07):

I feel like two things that y’all said stood out to me. One, Michael, something you said resonated with me of just, Hey, you can’t talk about KPIs without first talking about what are we trying to do here? What’s that business outcome we’re pushing for? And then that’s going to drive some of the KPIs that are important and I think Laurin, your call out on, hey, we’re not just going to pick one KPI and be like this is our KPI that we’re interested in, right?

It’s going to change by channel, it’s going to change by product, it’s going to change by funnel stage. And so again, we would all love the easy button to be like, this is the KPI you should focus on, but what I’m hearing from you both is it’s a bigger conversation than that. It depends on the business outcome, it depends on where we are in the channel and kind of prioritizing those efforts.

Michael Garson (23:55):

And I think that is spot on and I think it’s also about, we talked about this balance before, always keeping the end goal of the business and that success metric in mind, being flexible with the KPIs, but having partners that are going to show you progress over time. I think that is the power of a platform like The Trade Desk and partners like Amsive, is that when we set these goals, if it’s a new channel or a new product, we may not know exactly what that KPI is going to be, but if we can understand it and then track and measure success over time, that is crucial.

Laurin Bobo (24:30):

Yeah, Allison talked about me playing beach volleyball. We’re very competitive people here, so we’re always trying to beat ourselves. So even if we don’t know exactly what a great CPA is or what row as we should be chasing, we’re at least always looking like you’re saying Michael, just better than last month, improving every time and making sure that we’re taking steps forward.

Balancing Compliance with Performance

Allison Wilson (24:52):

Yeah, and the joy too of working, Laurin and Michael get to work across verticals. They see a lot of exposure to a lot of different verticals. I just live in banking and credit union and financial services land all day every day, but that also comes with the joy of being able to pull in from a broader peer set too, where we can look across different regional banks or credit unions or what have you to try to see where there’s benchmarks are. But I do feel like in today’s fragmented world, understanding a benchmark for your own organization, for your own platform is super important. Knowing that everybody’s different, right? Everyone’s pushing towards a different goal.

So if we’ve made the executives happy at our financial institutions because we’re able to show those KPIs that matter, tie back to the business outcome, Laurin Bobo, you are going to solve all the world’s problems right now about how do we balance compliance while we’re maximizing the efforts, we’re like, this is cool.

We’re going to do all this stuff with audience and drive perform and it’s going to be great. Then we’re going to tell our executives, look at the contribution we’re getting with this REDs matchback data so we can understand impressions and pull through conversion and then insert screeching break sound. What are your thoughts on how financial brands are balancing compliance with maximizing performance?

Laurin Bobo (26:15):

It is such a balance, right?

Allison Wilson (26:19):

In two minutes though.

Laurin Bobo (26:20):

Okay, it’s two minutes. I’m just kidding. I think Michael said it earlier, I’m not a lawyer, so please talk to your compliance and legal teams before making any decisions. No, all jokes aside, I really think as much as it sounds like a plug, but partnering with good trusted partners, whether that’s Amsive or another agency, especially The Trade Desk, making sure that you’re working with a partner that’s offering transparency, but also agility, especially as compliance changes happen all the time, every single day, making sure that you’ve got a partner that’s ready to be agile in market and make changes as necessary and being communicative and transparent when we need to be.

The Trade Desk in particular offers some pretty awesome controls over things like inventory placement, audience data, which really allows us to be transparent and help mitigate the fears of our compliance teams, helps give us information to them to help make the decisions they need to be making on their side while also making sure that our media strategies are adapting as needed.

My number one plug, my piece of advice here if you take nothing else from this is please do not wait until the final stages of media planning or trafficking to talk to compliance. We should be talking to compliance early on in the process, making sure that they’re in lockstep with us, holding hands between us and your platform partners as well as your marketing teams at the financial institutions to make sure that everybody’s in lockstep, understanding what we’re doing, how it’s going to work.

That way we don’t get the screeching breaks as we’re all about to cross the finish line and launch something. I think we’ve all been there, but just making sure that we’re balancing and being proactive, especially with partners like The Trade Desk that help keep us safe where we can and give us the control to be safe and keep compliance teams happy.

Allison Wilson (28:08):

Okay, Laurin, I have to have you give this example that you’ve given before. Can you do your little metaphor on taxis and Ubers because I feel if our compliance friends understood your analogy, it would give them a lot of peace and comfort in combination with the controls that we have in platforms like The Trade Desk. Can you please, I know I’m going a little off book here, but can you please give your analogy because I’m going to use it from here and forever?

Laurin Bobo (28:35):

Boy. Yeah, I mean especially when we talk about it’s little bit Programmatic  101, but it is how I explain programmatic to people who’ve never been a part of it. Essentially, for those of you following along at home, back in the day we used to buy advertising by calling individual websites, individual programs. You would literally call or email the New York Times or CBS News and book and negotiate and work through contracts and give invoice details and pick out the exact specific inventory, the time of day, the webpage you wanted to be on, and it was a very manual process for each individual website or partner that you wanted to partner with.

But these days what programmatic does is essentially like calling an Uber rather than having to call a taxi, remember a phone number or walk up to a bar, a bartender and say, Hey, you got a phone number for a taxi?

I can call and figure out the actual taxi that you’re going to call, give them your credit card, give them an address, all of that, that’s old school, programmatic, The Trade Desk, we’re talking Uber now. We’re literally hopping onto one platform. Our credit card’s already saved, it knows the address, we’re able to plug it in and an auction happens essentially in that moment trying to bid for our business. Same thing with programmatic. We’re hopping in this platform, we’re giving it parameters, we’re telling at the audience we want to reach all within one platform making things pretty seamless for us to be able to buy things. So The Trade Desk is Uber instead of the old school way of buying media with calling individual taxis.

Allison Wilson (30:08):

And I bring that up because as we talk about bringing in compliance early and often and having those conversations, I think it’s important that we as marketers spend all day every day talking this stuff and they don’t. And sometimes using those types of analogy, that’s a freebie for all of y’all out there if you want to use that analogy with your compliance friends of just telling ’em this is what programmatic is, right? This is about efficiency and this is about reaching our audience in the spaces in places where they are. So thank you Laurin, for entertaining me a little bit on your analogy, but of

Laurin Bobo (30:41):

Course, you’re so right though it sometimes half the battle is just making sure that we’re explaining to our compliance and legal teams and even our executives, our internal stakeholders, other than the marketing teams, making sure they understand what it is we’re buying without all the jargon. Rather than saying, oh, I bought CTV. That sometimes means nothing to people, but instead explaining, Michael, you called it out, I bought inventory. I’m targeting my audience. This list of people, if they’re watching March Madness this upcoming weekend, we’re going to be there. We’re going to bid on that impression there.

Michael Garson (31:13):

And I think to that point, and I know this is something we all always intend to do, but may not always be possible, but with the compliance teams, it’s like ask the questions. You should have partners, whether that be other folks, other agencies, other DSPs or companies like The Trade Desk, they should be able to give you, they can’t give particular legal advice, but they should be able to help you answer the questions so that you can bring it to your legal teams ideally before there’s that fire drill. To your point, they are not in the weeds and know every single acronym like us as marketers. So for them to first learn who these companies are that we’re working with, then as things progress with partnerships, it should be easier for them to make decisions that are best for their business.

Case Studies and Real-World Applications

Allison Wilson (32:00):

Yeah, I love that. Okay, so we talked a little bit about audience, we talked a little bit about measurement. I feel like the proof is in the pudding on let’s look back at some case studies. So we’re going to pivot a little bit. And I will tell you, I love case studies. I love what I get to do. I love talking to clients all day, every day. And when we think about programmatic in action, we have a leading regional bank, love them, been working with them for a while where we had a challenge really to grow new to bank households. Sound familiar to folks on the phone. A lot of our clients are trying to do this, right? Ever evolving rates going up, rates going down. I don’t know what rates are doing, but really this was the power of taking an audience first approach where we leveraged first party data to build a modeled audience and then we’re able to load that audience in programmatically and influence every stage of the funnel, right?

Upper funnel, mid funnel, lower funnel. And I think a lot of times we as marketers know the value of the full funnel. I think sometimes the leaders of our financial institutions really see the value of lower funnel, like love search all day long, love direct mail all day long, this brand stuff, this upper funnel stuff, don’t like it. You bought tv, what did it do for me? Well, the value and one of the case studies of one of the best ways to use programmatic is using it across the funnel, right?

 Use it for those upper funnel tactics like CTV, like audio where we can really take a very targeted approach to meet these people where they are in those upper funnel channels like CTV and audio, but then also meet them in the programmatic display ecosystem. And then what’s really cool is we can do some cool stuff related to understanding conversion lift of saying, okay, they were exposed to upper funnel tactic.

What was the impact to app starts? App completes, right? And the numbers on the right speak for themselves. We drove a lot of good performance leveraging the power of this, what we’ve been talking about, known audience, specific objective KPIs that matter, communicating across the organization. So anyway, this is a really great client and a really great case study.

I would love to now segue over to Laurin and Michael and here’s some of their examples too because I know they’ve got some, we’ll start with Laurin. You got a real life example of a FI who’s significantly improved their programmatic, some of the best playbook stuff. Hey, let’s see what other people are doing.

Laurin Bobo (34:39):

Yeah, we’ve got a big one. We’ve talked a lot about compliance. That’s kind of where I’m going on the one that comes to mind, we’ve got a client in the financial sector who was facing challenges internally with reporting transparency data, being compliant and making sure honestly that we were being brand safe, especially in the world that we are currently in, making sure that ads are only showing up next to content that we wanted to and transparently working with some of our social partners, that’s not always an option.

What you get is what you get. There’s not a lot of control that we can have. There’s not a lot of transparency and data reporting, and it can be hard to trust that we are being compliant. So where we could, we made the recommendation to shift some budget from social to programmatic to help alleviate some of those concerns.

And we saw that leveraging that additional transparency and control that we were offered, not only improved reporting, made everybody feel a little bit more comfortable, but also saw a pretty significant increase in overall return on investment. Just like you were talking about Allison, one of the biggest measurements that we’re able to provide that help convince people of the power of programmatic is that improvement on down funnel conversion rates.

Being able to say somebody saw a CTV ad, somebody saw an ad watching March Madness, somebody listened to a podcast, somebody saw a display ad on the New York Times, and as a result they did a search and they converted more frequently, more often for cheaper than anybody else who had not seen those ads. That is such a golden metric that we’re able to provide, but being able to control brand safety and make sure we’re being compliant and making sure that we’re doing all of that helped us to achieve media goals while keeping all the internal stakeholders happy, which we know is so important at every brand, but especially at a financial institution.

Allison Wilson (36:27):

Yeah, it’s funny, we were talking about some of the data we get back from The Trade Desk, Red’s data, raw event data stream where we actually understand impressions and eyeballs and then in a data compliant privacy first mindset. So it’s all been anonymized, can understand conversion data, and I was talking to that with a client. It was their analytics team and their marketing team, and literally the analytics person in teams as we were talking about understanding programmatic performance through the lens of actual eyes on ads and then conversion, did the emoji teams clap thing, which for those

Laurin Bobo (37:06):

An underrated emoji.

Allison Wilson (37:08):

An underrated emoji. And if for those of you who work with analytics and compliance people, they’re not real emoji happy. They don’t use the emoji very often. I was like, oh my God, I got a clappy hands emoji. That’s great. That’s good. So yeah, I think the transparency and the understanding, the true performance comes back to that measurement conversation we were having. It’s so important to be able to understand the efficacy and while we’re, all of us on this phone are omnichannel marketers, we want to use the full funnel.

There are times where you lean into channels that give you a little bit more transparency. Those walled gardens, sometimes they are what they are and we need to use them, but it is nice when we can actually understand performance, love those examples. What about you, Michael? You got some other lessons learned or another example you want to share about applying programmatic strategies?

Michael Garson (38:00):

I mean, we talked a lot about transparency, but I think it’s something that is so crucial to these challenges and successes that we talked about with using first party data, determining what the right metrics are. It’s really hard to do if you don’t have that transparency both in the platforms you’re buying, but also the partnerships. So I think in order to get there, sometimes it could be a game of telephone, and this is more of a mistake to learn from where it’s,

We may only hear one thing based off of what they’re asking, but if we’re all at the table, whether that be the brand Amsive and The Trade Desk having transparent relationships, we can all provide this information to get towards what those goals are to determine.

There may not be first party data for us to use, but how can we get close with third party and really have those collaborative brainstorm sessions up front to define success and also to inform the creative ideas that different partners can bring proactively to the clients to continue to try to be creative and try new things to stand out in their marketing,

Allison Wilson (39:10):

That diversity of thought and ideas. I love that kind of emphasis. Sometimes I bring in military jargon, it’s fun. They like the phrase shut up in color, but they also like foot stomp. I’m going to foot stomp something Michael said, meaning this is important that people who have diverse perspectives just see the problem from a different chair. And that’s helpful when we’ve got our platform people, when we’ve got people like Laurin, even the three of us just talking right here, we all see it from a different perspective. And if we can all get together around the table and have a conversation on how can we do better? How can we drive more performance? It’s game changing.

Michael Garson (39:51):

Yeah, and I think it’s so important to say, I may not always have the answer, but I can get you from someone that works at The Trade Desk. That answer should be, and the most we can give you. But I think what’s unacceptable for any of the partners is saying, oh yeah, we don’t know where it ran. I mean, that just is, in today’s world,

Allison Wilson (40:08):

A hundred percent.

Michael Garson (40:09):

Could not be acceptable for marketers to accept that.

Laurin Bobo (40:14):

And transparently we hear it all the time, which is crazy.

Allison Wilson (40:19):

Yeah, no, it is insane. And that’s why, yeah, there’s so much value and especially with FIs, and I’m sure every industry feels this way about themselves. We are held to such a high standard of performance. And I’m sure if you go to other verticals, they feel the same way. But I feel it so deeply in financial services that when you don’t have transparency, you can’t get to the answers you need. Exactly. And so it’s like the constant battle of, ah, if I don’t truly understand performance here, how can I rationalize the spend? Oh, that sounds bad. We’re going to pivot. We’re going to pivot away from negativity.

Laurin Bobo (41:00):

No more negativity, only positive.

AI and the Future of Financial Marketing

Allison Wilson (41:02):

I don’t know. We will see. We see where we go. Laurin, I feel like we should go. We did a little bit of look back on some case studies of what has worked, but let’s talk about going forward. We know the only constant has changed. It’s happening faster. So we’re all panicking, especially Michael and I with tiny humans. I guess let’s talk about AI machine learning. They’re playing a bigger role in advertising. How do you see Michael that changing for programmatic and specifically for FIs? Like we all hear about AI machine learning. How do you see that changing for programmatic?

Michael Garson (41:39):

Yeah, I think that with AI within programmatic, we have always used AI to make, to analyze big data sets and do things that work alongside the humans that are pressing buttons within our platform to make it more efficient.

So utilizing that, the predictive analysis, a lot of those features we talked about to look at first party data and expand it out is all through using AI. But I think then when you start thinking about all of the new companies and new data sets and the computing power, a key to success there is focusing on, again, quality of the data you’re putting in and what you’re measuring, the teams that you’re doing it with and being able to understand it. I think that for AI and all of these other emerging channels, and there’s always going to be new partners, you need to work with people.

And something that’s really important and differentiated about The Trade Desk is, as I mentioned earlier, we are an open platform. So if there’s specific data sets or AI companies that are doing really cool analysis or custom algorithms, you can bring that in to apply to your campaigns easily. And I think that, again, it goes back to that understanding, is this going to work for our business? Let’s qualify it. And then when we apply, being able to tell if it worked or not.

Allison Wilson (42:56):

Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny too. We talk AI and machine learning and we act like all of this is really new, but it’s funny, you think programmatic is the OG of doing things more efficiently.

Laurin Bobo (43:09):

It really is.

Allison Wilson (43:11):

But even still, y’all are evolving and changing, so that’s great.

Michael Garson (43:16):

Yeah, I think that it’s like there’s so many now consumer applications of ai, but I think that to that point, it was just maybe used different terms, but ever since, I mean, the entire concept of how The Trade Desk works is using data at every second to make the best bid decision. Obviously, there’s a ton of AI being put into that based off of what’s going to drive the best outcome for your brands.

Allison Wilson (43:39):

Yeah. Okay. One last negative question and then we’ll pull up here at the end. And it’s for you, Laurin, biggest challenges in programmatic advertising for financial services? How are you telling your clients to prepare? What do you see those challenges being? And talk to me a little bit about that.

Laurin Bobo (43:59):

Yeah, maybe it doesn’t need to be negative. Maybe we can think about, it’s a challenge, but an opportunity, right?

Allison Wilson (44:05):

Okay.

Laurin Bobo (44:06):

It’s an opportunity. It’s a very glass half full for me to think about it that way, but privacy and compliance regulations are changing really fast right now, and especially within some of the walled gardens and advertising. It can be really hard for our clients and even us sometimes to understand what’s happening and adapt quickly, but making sure that we are staying with new technologies and any kind of apology shifts and teaming up with partners like us that’s staying on top of things, especially when we’ve got people, Allison like you who are so ingrained in the industry, and you get to see such a great wide view of everything, helps all of us to stay more on top of things, but also partners like The Trade Desk who are super transparent, super on top of things are helping all of our brands navigate this better.

Allison Wilson (44:57):

Yeah, no, and right back at you, Laurin too. It’s like, Hey, we come to it and a lot of people on this phone are financial services clients, and you go, yeah, we bring a certain perspective, but you and Michael bring the kind of channel level strategy and expertise that we need. And I think the magic can happen when those things come together where we’re partnering from a, how does the platform work, how can we optimize it with the knowledge of the industry to really stay ahead?

And those walled gardens are, I don’t think they’re changing anytime soon. And so we’re going to just have to continue to adapt with those changes. Okay. One last question, and it’s the same question for you both before we pivot to some q and a. Hopefully there’s some q and a, I think I see some floating out there, but if you had one piece of advice, Laurin and Michael, to immediately improve the people on this phone and Zoom calls programmatic efforts, what would it be? I’ll go to Laurin first.

Laurin Bobo (46:01):

Okay. Can I give two?

Allison Wilson (46:02):

That’s cheating. That’s cheating, but I will allow it as a generous and benevolent host, I will allow it.

Laurin Bobo (46:08):

Okay. You’re so generous. Thank you. You’re welcome. So this might be a controversial take, but—

Allison Wilson (46:15):

Ooh, hot take.

Laurin Bobo (46:16):

I like it. Rely solely on walled gardens, Google and Meta Absolute and all the other walled gardens in the space, but they’re the big ones. They absolutely have their place in your media mix. They are so important to driving performance. This is not me saying that’s not where you should spend your advertising dollars by any means, but including platforms for other purposes, that whole omnichannel hitting everybody where they’re at in the world today is super important. And especially making sure that, again, we’re aligning with our legal and compliance teams really early.

And the second one, so important, activate your first party data effectively, whatever that means to you, and we can help you navigate that. We’ve got scientists on staff, audience, science, PhDs on staff that can help us analyze that, but make sure that we are effectively using our first party data because it is the number one most important thing for your marketing these days.

Allison Wilson (47:11):

And little did everyone know that this was actually sponsored by legal and compliance today, how many times we talked about still partner with legal and compliance, all the legal and compliance people feel really good about themselves today, and they don’t know why. It’s because y’all keep saying you can’t not talk about it into the fold. Give them a hug, maybe not a hug, but just bring them in.

Laurin Bobo (47:29):

They are so important to marketing with financial institutions, as I’m pretty sure every single person on this call knows, and we know how that works. We’re with you every step of the way on that.

Allison Wilson (47:39):

Okay, so Laurin’s two was don’t rely on walled gardens and activate your first party. And I feel like Michael, since I gave Laurin more than one, you can have more than one too. Even though I asked for only one, it’s the world is your oyster. Michael, what tips, advice would you give?

Michael Garson (47:54):

I mean, I think we have a tendency to try to overcomplicate everything sometimes. What I’m never, I’m going to try to keep this really simple

That Laurin mentioned focusing on quality data and then buying on premium content and asking what is premium content? It could be connected TV, Disney, Netflix, et cetera, that you can buy in programmatic. Now, if you create these good consumer experiences on content that they enjoy consumer, you’re going to build trust as a brand. And those better consumer experiences maybe where they may not expect to hear your ads on a Spotify podcast when they’re at the gym, it’s going to drive better outcomes.

We can and we have into all the data and the measurement, but just simply put of premium content and doing good marketing in terms of the relevance and personalized messaging, it’s going to drive better outcomes for your business and better consumer experiences.

Allison Wilson (49:01):

Awesome, thank you. And for the first time in my life, I said we were going to save about 10 minutes for Q and A at the end, and by some miracle, we made it with 11 minutes for Q and A. So I think, Leih, you are going to help be our A and A DJ of sorts. Can you let us know what’s out there and we can kind of start knocking around some of those questions, what we can get through?

Q & A

Leih Boyden (49:25):

Yes, there are many good questions and we’ll get through as many as we can. The first one is how do you ensure brand safety? Is there validity in providing exclusion lists for placements with programmatic partners?

Allison Wilson (49:41):

Oh, that feels like a Laurin Bobo question all over.

Laurin Bobo (49:44):

Yeah, so there’s lots of different ways to ensure brand safety. We use a couple of different partners within The Trade Desk to help ensure that this can be done both from an inventory perspective. We also have a partner that helps us stay on top of breaking news with a negative keyword list. Contextually brand safety also is a very broad word. So we also have things that help us with things like click fraud, making sure that we’re not on websites made for advertising, make sure we’re on websites that don’t have really high refresh rates or too many ads on a page.

We also use things within the brand safety space to make sure that sentiment is positive. We’re not on anything like negative news or anything tragic, anything of that nature. So lots of ways to attack brand safety. And we do see placement exclusion lists being pretty important, especially within the news space, being really careful based on a client’s or a brand where they align where they want to be showing up on the internet. We can use exclusion lists in that regard.

Leih Boyden (50:46):

The next question is what are some specific examples of compliance questions that come up? So what should we be thinking about if we haven’t involved compliance and programmatic before?

Allison Wilson (51:04):

Oh, that is such a good question, and I might take a first pass at it and then let Michael and Laurin.

Laurin Bobo (51:10):

Michael and Laurin, I was thinking you, too, Allison.

Allison Wilson (51:11):

Because I’m married to a lawyer and I deal with compliance people all the time. I think the question Lee was just like, Hey, what are those questions we should be asking or bringing to the table for our compliance friends? Was that the question, Leih?

Leih Boyden (51:27):

Yep.

Allison Wilson (51:28):

Okay. So I think the things that you should bring to the table when you’re talking to compliance is one, helping them understand just, Hey, compliance friend, what’s your understanding of the marketing ecosystem today? And don’t presume upon them that they don’t know what’s going on. So asking them like, Hey, what’s your knowledge level? We’d love to partner with you. Depending on their answer to that question, I think you double down and first give them a base level understanding of what you’re trying to do related to programmatic advertising.

And I think it always comes back to audience. So the other piece is making sure that you have a lockdown understanding of what’s your objective and who that audience is. So oftentimes we help clients build models. We have a ton of experience building models. If you’re building models internally, I’m sure you have experience doing this too, to make sure that you’re not tripping any flags for fair lending or any UDAP concerns.

Like, oh, you’re only targeting people that look like Allison. And so if you take an audience-centric approach and you leverage that audience-centric approach in programmatic, as long as the audience was built in a mindful way that goes through, I’m sure all of y’all’s model risk management teams, I know all of y’all have those, right? At the end of the day, then the conversation with compliance gets to be an easier one, right? Hey, I’ve already worked with model risk management. We have an understanding of this audience.

Now we’re going to go find them in the spaces and places where they operate. The audience is great, now we’re going to go find them. Now. That’s kind of the first party angle. Third party angle. Again, when we think about leveraging data that’s in The Trade Desk, interested in checking accounts and likely to bank local, those are things that we say, look, we’re not leveraging any things that would trip any triggers with our friends in the compliance and legal department. But that would kind of be my high level approach is one, get an understanding of where they’re at.

Two, make sure they understand what your audience and objective is. And then the third is now that they’ve got an understanding of that, it’s just leveraging Laurin Bobo’s Uber example. We’re just finding these people now in the spaces and places where they operate. Michael or Laurin, anything you’d add to that?

Laurin Bobo (53:39):

No, I think you nailed it.

Michael Garson (53:41):

Yeah.

Allison Wilson (53:42):

Nailed it. Mic drop. Okay.

Allison Wilson (53:48):

Onward.

Leih Boyden (53:49):

Yes. So when we’re balancing the funnel and when we’re thinking about programmatic, how do you balance between the amount of upper funnel tactics and lower funnel tactics?

Allison Wilson (54:03):

Who wants to take that one?

Laurin Bobo (54:06):

I can take it unless Michael, you wanted to feel like we’ve been talking a lot. Okay.

Allison Wilson (54:12):

Michael’s used to us at this point, Laurin.

Laurin Bobo (54:13):

He knows we talk a lot. He knows we talk a lot. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So balance is the key word here. A lot of the channels programmatic wise are more upper funnel channels, specifically things like connected television and audio tend to be very upper funnel display tends to be a little bit more upper mid funnel. It also depends on how you’re using it, who your audience is, right? If you’re hitting a broad audience who’s never heard of you before, that’s significantly more upper funnel.

Whereas if you start to hit your customer list, trying to do a cross sell of a product, if they have a credit card but they don’t have a checking account, it’s a little bit different of a messaging, a little bit different spot in the funnel. And also, programmatic can also play in that lower funnel space as well. We have some clients, I’m talking in broad strokes.

We’ve got a client who is doing some CTV advertising that is driving eCommerce sales. I know we’re talking about financial, but it’s driving eCommerce sales. So we’re directly attributing to connected television at extremely efficient cost per sales, which is incredible. So everything can be played in every single space. A lot of it depends on your creative, your messaging, and also who you’re targeting.

Allison Wilson (55:25):

And I feel like ultimately it comes back to the buzzword of the day, transparency and understanding what’s driving performance. If you know your objective, that’s going to help drive the optimal mix of where you’re spending upper, mid, and lower funnel. And what you’ll see is, hey, we’re going to invest in some upper funnel tactics and we’re going to see what the downstream impact is. But if we understand the true impression data and what that’s driving from a conversion perspective, let that be the barometer to drive future investment decisions.

Laurin Bobo (55:56):

And a lot of it is just testing and learning. That’s a buzzword. But sometimes it’s just about experimenting, it’s trying, it’s using data, it’s using what we know about our customers, what we know works from a holistic perspective, but also sometimes it does come down to running an experiment, running a test to see where we can get some traction. And that’s how sometimes we find some of our best performing tactics.

Michael Garson (56:20):

Yeah, I mean, I’ll add onto that just real quickly. I we’re coming up on time, is that one of the major benefits of working with an omnichannel platform like this is you can easily test, can set up all of the different channels to measure the value of it. You could test it in small geos with small budgets through small flights, but you could determine these things very quickly without having to commit to a year long of a certain channel. So you could put it on off.

But the key is ensuring that it’s set up from the beginning so that you can answer the question is, is this working? I think in the past that’s been really difficult or is difficult today if you’re segmenting your buys across a lot of different partners that aren’t speaking with each other through the lens of reporting and identity.

Laurin Bobo (57:08):

It’s just like canceling an Uber or changing where your destination is in your Uber. It’s we’re agile in the new world.

Allison Wilson (57:16):

We are Uber. Sorry, please for the love—Allison, shut up. We have another question.

Leih Boyden (57:23):

Sorry, there’s so many good questions. Was trying to get to ’em. The final question is though, so considering AI, AI has come up a lot, how does The Trade Desk and how does Amsive have specific safeguards in place with client data, with the data that you’re giving you or any other relevant policies there?

Allison Wilson (57:42):

Okay, I’ll take a stab at the Amsive side and then I’ll kick it over to Michael and I feel like we need a 2.0 of this webinar. I would love to cover more of these questions, but for us at Amsive, we always take a human plus machine approach. It’s never only going to be just the machine. We have people hands on keyboard who are evaluating all this stuff. So while we love ai, it makes us more efficient, it helps us drive smarter decisions faster. There will always be a human involved and that’s one of the safeguards. I think just that’s pretty broad brush stoke that we apply to making sure we’re not letting the machines run amuck. But Michael, you want to talk a little bit about it from The Trade Desk perspective?

Michael Garson (58:20):

Yeah, I think a big thing, and this is again where when we talk about working with compliance teams and legal because they may not understand The Trade Desk business model, but we don’t accept any I as a companies that can be directly uploaded to our platform. So when we get the data within the system, we talked a lot about audiences and consumers, but that data is hashed and when it’s used within The Trade Desk, it is overall not I or directly identifiable information.

So I think that’s a big one to start. And then I think that regardless of how AI is using it and how people are interacting with it, it still comes down to the platforms you’re working with and then finding the balance also of what is legal for your business and other partners can provide you with. Here’s our stance on this. You have to make your own decision and ensure that your teams are comfortable with it.

Allison Wilson (59:18):

Totally. Great call out too. Yeah, every client’s going to be different. They’re have a different perspective on what’s okay and what’s not. That’s okay. The platform’s flexible.

Michael Garson (59:26):

It’s not one size fits all.

Allison Wilson (59:27):

Yep. Well, I know that was our last question. I wish we had another hour. I’m sure y’all are like, oh dear God, shut up Allison. But no, really appreciate your time. We hope to do more of these just to engage on topics that are important for our financial services clients. So thanks for making time. If you need anything, you reach out to us, you reach out to any of us on this call, we’d love to hear from you and appreciate the time. Y’all have a great rest of your day.

Michael Garson (59:53):

Thanks everybody.

Allison Wilson (59:55):

Bye.

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