TV, Outdoor Still Dominate CommBank Media Spend: Marketing Boss

CommBank’s acting CMO, Monique Macleod has revealed TV still takes the lion’s share of its media spend at the IAB’s Measure Up conference this morning.

With 33 per cent of Australia’s largest bank’s media spend, TV is sitting pretty. However, outdoor was nipping at its heels with 30 per cent.

Digital video made up 17 per cent of Australia’s third largest company’s spend, while the remaining 20 per cent was clumped together as “other” – meaning radio, print, search and whatever else you care to imagine were fighting for the not unsubstational scraps.

Perhaps more revealing, however, was Macleod’s use of a sales and marketing funnel, which would have ruffled a few feathers at the digital advertising love in. IAB boss Vijay Solanki couldn’t help having a dig at the conclusion of Macleod’s presentation saying it was “good to see a funnel; I haven’t seen one of those for a while”.

The reason is pretty simple. CommBank is very focused on the entire customer experience rather than digital’s stock in trade of last click attribution, performance and so forth as opposed to the much harder to measure long-term brand building metrics the CommBank is embracing.

“Customer satisfaction has been our stand out measure for some time,” she said.

Also interesting and a further warning to media agencies, which have put their eggs in the programmatic basket, Macleod said since bringing all programmatic and paid search buying in house in 2015, the cost of acquisition has dropped 20 and 30 per cent respectively.

However while the savings are a boon for the bank, Macleod argued the real reasons surrounded a broader trust and transparency issue.

“Customers are very, very clear about what they expect from us in terms of their data and how we utilise it, so we had to protect it,” she said.

“So we really felt the need to bring this in-house, because by bringing together our first-party data, with what we wanted to do in terms of our targeting and our messaging, we knew that we could deliver better outcomes. So far that’s what we’re seeing.”

What also came through load and clear was the increasing importance of digital in the bank’s acquisition strategy and the fact that actions speak louder than words.

In scrapping its $2 ATM fee the response on social was massive, said Macleod. And it was something pretty much the whole world new was really irking Australians and so by being first, the CommBank garnered more good will than you could imagine.

She also articulated about how digital was much more about about simple and easy solutions such as giving small business data analytics tools for free based on their customer data or even simple budgeting tools or mortgage calculators.

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Comm Bank Monique Macleod