In this series on managing the digital revolution, Ari Aronson and Stephan Argent collect insights from both the agency and the brand sides of the street.
This week, Marketing contributor Stephan Argent reaches out to Tangerine’s chief marketing officer Andrew Zimakas to get an idea how the brand is navigating its way through the digital marketing revolution.
What’s your vision for the future of digital in your organization?
Digital has been part of our DNA from the outset. A lot of people don’t realize we started as a telephone bank rather than an online bank, but we followed telephone banking fairly quickly with online banking so virtually from the outset there’s a been a digital component to what we’ve done. And over time, as social and mobile and other technologies and platforms evolved, we’ve embraced and adopted those quite early. We don’t have a lot of philosophical discussions around how we migrate or integrate digital into our lexicon here.
All of that carries over into our basic philosophy, which is that digital needs to be part of what we do — we can’t treat it as a separate part of what we do and we can’t underestimate the importance of non-digital elements or how we connect the digital components in a seamless way. We’re a direct bank, focused on simplicity as our core functional benefit. The common theme is that yes digital is critical and digital innovation is very important, but it’s how we think about it in an integrated way so that it’s woven into the fabric of the experience we’re trying to deliver to our clients.
Our focus is on the integration of all of our digital touch points — mobile and the web and ensuring a seamless experience through navigation and functionality, social media and digital marketing (i.e. search, banner pre-roll, etc.) One of the ways we’ve been able to ensure integration is by developing internal capabilities around digital and working with the agency as an extension of our team.
What areas of digital do you do in-house vs. outsource and why?
First, let me give you a perspective on our new structure because the scope of our marketing function at Tangerine is reasonably broad and comprises several key areas.
The first area is customer insights, which includes customer strategy and is principally responsible for customer segmentation and strategies around addressing customer segment needs. It also comprises all of analytics and market research and competitive intelligence.
The second area is integrated marketing. That’s another fairly broad area that encompasses all of marketing communications and creative strategy and execution. So when the rubber hits the road within our integrated marketing group it’s channel agnostic – that’s digital and offline. It comprises creative services and what we’re calling marketing communication management — CRM and so forth.
The third area is customer experience, which is now a formalized part of the marketing mandate (albeit the entire organization plays a role in creating and delivering it), so we’re creating a customer experience group, and it’s structure and resources are being formalized as we crystalize our customer experience vision and strategy.
And finally, corporate communications. For us, corporate communications comprises everything that is non-marketing communications in nature (and that’s a blurred line sometimes). Social media is part of that group, as is PR and earned media and internal communications. Sponsorship and community and investment are also part of that group. There’s also a content and shared services component, that’s focused on creating and curating compelling content and leveraging that content across the funnel. French services, graphic design and writing also reside there.
One other area is marketing operations and planning, which is focused on making sure everything is holistic and integrated and runs properly.
So in answer to the question, social is one of the key pieces we’ve kept entirely in-house to operationalize the strategy. The digital marketing piece itself is a hybrid model where we leverage agency partners, but have marketing specialists in-house who tend to be digitally-focused. We’re now expecting those same marketing specialists to have capabilities both in digital and non digital.
We look to our agency for two things as it relates to digital:
The first is the overall creative strategy and ensuring that it resonates well digitally and how it can be activated. The second is from an executional standpoint. We view them as an extension of our team. We’re also increasingly looking for measurement from each of our agencies and to facilitate the best way to measure certain activities.
On the digital side – a specific example of ensuring that creative ideas resonate well in specific digital mediums relates to the recent launch of Tangerine. We use contextual search on YouTube whereby if someone searches for information on home renovations for example, we would be able to serve up pre-roll that was contextually relevant to what that search would be about in terms of savings for home renovations. We had about 20 different versions that we launched through YouTube. That was a bit different and a great example of how we took the creative idea around the brand launch and extended it digitally in a way that was contextual.
Do you use a one-stop agency or split out digital separately and why?
We’ve transitioned to more of a one-stop agency model that’s more integrated. The model we pursued in the past was more of a best in breed agency ecosystem model where we looked for everyone to collaborate in the sandbox and bring their best work because they had certain deep capabilities that were difficult to replicate in a single agency.
Where digital is concerned specifically, we’ve moved to a more integrated model with John St. The prime agency we work with needs to think of the brand in digital terms. That was an implicit requirement when we went through our agency search process, and has only grown in importance over the past few years.
How has digital impacted your marketing org chart?
The headline here is that we’re not trying to compartmentalize digital, so when you look at the five areas of our group, [digital] resides in different ones in different ways. Web design and web development resides within customer experience, as does mobile customer experience. Social media resides within corporate communications. Digital marketing resides within integrated marketing. Measurement of social media resides within customer insights, as does measurement of digital marketing in general. Each of the areas of the team have digital focus in different ways. We had a digital and interactive group not long ago and they’re no longer called digital and interactive, by and large that’s now integrated marketing and different aspects of what they were doing have been distributed amongst the team.
What are the biggest challenges you’re facing from a digital perspective?
Avoiding shiny objects. Avoiding putting technology at the centre instead of the customer at the centre. A humorous thesis around this is QR Codes Kill Kittens by Scott Stratten – where brands are grasping onto opportunities around technology as opposed to thinking about what fundamentally is going to make things easier and better for my customers.
We have face to face interaction through our cafes and events and so on, but we never had a seamless way to enroll customers. So we’re piloting an enrollment app that is entirely tablet based that scans information from a drivers license, pre-populates information and lets someone leave as a customer with a funded account (because they’re able to take a photo of a cheque and submit it, or fund the account via a debit transaction from their other bank). That’s an example of looking at a problem, recognizing it’s too difficult and less seamless than we or customers would prefer, and then leveraging a digital solution to make it simple.
A second challenge might be measurement. Are we measuring the right thing? Are we integrating measurement in a way that it paints a useful picture of the right thing? That’s a constant evolving challenge, which is agnostic to digital, albeit digital creates more real time data.
What are the key expectations from your (brand) / digital partner?
Help us create a consistent customer experience and creative ideas that resonate across digital and offline channels. The other expectation from an executional perspective is speed. Help us do what we need to do quickly and reduce cycle time. That speaks to digital marketing and mobile development time, which is a key focus area for our IT colleagues.
What key lessons have you learned as an organization when it comes to digital?
Don’t separate it and don’t create sub cultures around digital. Be completely clear this is part of the fabric of who we are and it’s a basic expectation that we will think about digital and have people who have skill sets that include digital, but transcend digital as well. Part of that is cultural. Sometimes you develop sub-cultures and you develop a lexicon around digital that tends to be exclusionary. We really want to integrate and demystify it.
How do you decide to allocate budget between traditional and digital initiatives?
Business and brand objectives. A case in point is that we’re in a transition period now where it’s critical we establish Tangerine as a brand. A big part of that is awareness and in terms of investment, television’s going to play a huge role despite all the prognostications around television. Digital is playing a huge role in integrating with broadcast and offline mediums. Digital is playing both an awareness / understanding role, but also a much more effective call to action role.
This is a very different place than when we were pre brand transition, where digital was proportionally taking a much greater share of total spend because we had secured awareness and by and large we were using digital very effectively to drive call to action, but not to the exclusion of broader offline mediums.
How can agencies be more effective to you and other marketers in their digital solutions?
Start with a measurement focus in mind. If you can’t succinctly express how it can be measured, then perhaps what’s being proposed needs to be rethought. Thinking about digital and being innovative around how we think about digital is important but, not without thinking about how it integrates with other aspects of the marketing mix or how it integrates overall from a strategic perspective.
What’s the one thing you’d like your digital agency to do better?
It’s early, but if I think about it more broadly, it would be to collaborate with us on how we can heighten a measurement focus. I say collaborate because I think the onus is on us is to jointly figure it out. I don’t think either of us can do it independently. We both bring different perspectives, different tools and different capabilities. It’s becoming table stakes for an agency relationship now.
Stephan Argent is president at The Argedia Group, an agency management consultancy.
