Month: June 2018

Finn, Chase’s digital-only mobile banking app, rolled out to iOS users across the U.S. Thursday — the first step of a phased approach to scale the brand nationally. It has been testing it in St. Louis since October.

Finn’s wider rollout is evidence of the opportunity banks see in serving younger, digitally-native users, and a sign that the agile, iterative approach to products typical of startups is making its way to the big banks.

“We want to learn beyond St. Louis, and understand how prospective customers feel about this offering, do they find it valuable, and how much are they using it, and how do we think about the evolution of this product — we need to learn those things before general availability,” said Matt Gromada, managing director and chief product owner for Finn.

Chase wants to take the lessons from the St. Louis pilot and apply it to a broader audience of digitally-comfortable iOS users, ahead of an Android launch later this year. The St. Louis experiment yielded three key conclusions: Autosave triggered by rules is a priority for the customer community; a digital-only offering backed by a known, established player like Chase is a reason why customers trust Finn; and that a 24-hour-a-day client support team can replicate most of the functions of a brick-and-mortar branch. Customer feedback has inspired some product updates, including the ability to save a percentage of one’s paycheck, and pre-set autosave rules when customers spend at popular brands like Starbucks.

Chase emphasized that the iOS rollout in no way means the test phase for Finn has wrapped up; it’s still meeting with customers every three weeks, and customer feedback will inspire future iterations of the product. Keeping with its focus on digital, mobile-first customers as a testing ground, the marketing plan is entirely digital, centering on paid social media ads (Chase isn’t saying more beyond an Instagram presence), digital banner ads and videos.

“Our goal is to be as nimble with our marketing as possible, such that we are constantly learning from customers across the end-to-end experience of Finn,” said Gromada.

Chase’s approach to scaling Finn represents how banks are quickly releasing minimally-viable products that are effectively “works in progress” whose journeys are closely linked to how customers guide it along the way. It’s an approach that’s slowly making its way into the banking ecosystem. The six-month go-to-market plan of Barclays’ recent co-branded Uber credit card is a recent example of how banks are more quickly releasing products that can evolve with customer feedback, instead of striving to build “as perfect a product as possible” as part of a more rigid, stage-oriented “waterfall” approach.

Meanwhile, digital-only startup banks in Europe like Monzo are Revolut are regularly releasing product tests, offering customers opportunities to act as product developers. Instead of having an annual or biennial product release, a product can have four or five releases a year.

“You have to balance the risk in saying this product currently a minimally-viable product,” said Aite senior analyst David Albertazzi. “Banks are gaining expertise in agile development as this example shows — software companies are doing this; they’re using agile development methodology to focus on satisfying the customer experience.”

Finn is still an experiment for a customer segment that’s used to doing everything digitally in their non-financial lives — it’s perhaps a safe bet with population that’s accustomed to quick product evolutions in the digital world. It still may be a little early to use the same approach for products that serve a wider spectrum of customers, argues Celent senior analyst Stephen Greer.

“It’s an interesting route to take, and certainly out of the startup playbook, but this would really only work with something non-core like Finn,” he said. “You can’t fail fast or partially deliver functionality on a mobile banking app. Development cycles are to ensure stability, compliance, integration, and numerous other things.”

The post Inside Chase’s marketing strategy for digital-only brand Finn appeared first on Digiday.

In advertising’s golden age, “outdoor” was a category essentially synonymous with billboards. And while there are certainly still a few creative boards on display in this year’s top winners at the Cannes Lions, most of the golds went to out-of-home ideas that push the edges of how marketers can engage passersby. Take, for example, the…

Verizon is finally calling it quits on its expensive mobile video bet, Go90.

The wireless communications giant is shutting down the mobile video streaming service, which it launched in October 2015, according to four sources familiar with the situation. Go90 representatives have begun informing content partners about plans to end both the Go90 brand and the video streaming app by July 31, sources said. Go90 will also return the shows and all content rights back to its production partners, which included companies ranging from AwesomenessTV to Vice Media.

The move will end an expensive endeavor for Verizon, which over the years spent a significant amount of money on both content acquisition and marketing costs on Go90. It’s unclear exactly how much Verizon spent on Go90 over the years, but two sources close to Go90 estimated that the total cost for was roughly $1.2 billion. Another source close to Verizon disputed that figure and said the total cost was less than $300 million.

“Following the creation of Oath, Go90 will be discontinued,” said a Verizon spokesperson in a statement. “Verizon will focus on building its digital-first brands at scale in sports, finance, news and entertainment for today’s mobile consumers and tomorrow’s 5G applications.”

The service launched to great fanfare — Kanye West performed at the launch event — as Verizon attempted to build a mobile video streaming platform that could sit somewhere between Netflix and YouTube by providing TV-quality short-form and mid-form original series. (Go90 also offered licensed TV episodes and even live sports on the platform.) But Go90 consistently struggled to attract viewers who were used to YouTube for their short-form video needs, and Netflix and other streaming giants for other professionally produced, TV-quality programming.

In recent months, Verizon had moved many Go90 employees — many of whom came over as part of an acquisition of another ill-fated mobile video platform, Vessel — across various departments inside Oath, the digital publishing and technology company formed by the merger of AOL and Yahoo. According to a source, there were roughly a dozen employees working for Go90 in recent months. A source said there will be no personnel changes for now, and resources will be rerouted toward the various publishing and distribution platforms controlled by Oath.

Go90 did see some successes on the creative front, such as winning an Oscar for its “Dear Basketball” short film with Kobe Bryant. But sources admit that Go90 struggled to find an audience as a stand-alone app and that it made more sense to distribute original programming on Oath. Once Oath began distributing Go90 programming across its media properties, more than 17 million people were watching Go90 programming, according to Verizon.

Go90’s shutdown does not come as much of a surprise, especially in light of Oath CEO Tim Armstrong’s comments at a Recode event earlier this year. When asked if Go90 would remain, Armstrong said: “The brand will remain, I don’t know how long for.”

This story has been updated to include a statement from Verizon as well as information clarifying how much Verizon supposedly spent on Go90.

The post From Kanye to bust: Verizon is shutting down Go90, ending an expensive effort at mobile video streaming appeared first on Digiday.

Gizmodo Media Group will not lay off people after enough staffers took voluntary buyouts, editorial director Susie Banikarim told employees in a memo today. “While that is the outcome for which we’d hoped, any relief is bittersweet because it comes with the loss of talented and valued colleagues whose countless contributions will be greatly missed,”…

Pinterest introduced a tweak to speed up the process of saving Pins on desktop. Rather than taking three clicks–clicking the save button, picking a board and clicking the save button again–users can now click once to access a drop-down menu enabling them to save Pins in search, their home feeds or their following tabs. Pinterest…

Erik Oster contributed to this report. WPP has hired two outside law firms to investigate several anonymous, encrypted emails sent to its current and former employees, which came from a WhatsApp group that included onetime executive assistants to Martin Sorrell, the holding company’s founder and ex-CEO who abruptly stepped down in April, the Financial Times…

Facebook and Twitter each released new political advertising transparency tools on Thursday in preparation for the 2018 US midterm elections, as the social platforms try to forestall the malicious electoral interference they enabled during the 2016 election. Facebook began archiving electoral and issue-based ads in May, so any ad by an active candidate or featuring… Continue reading »

The post Facebook And Twitter Offer New Political Ad Transparency Tools To Head Off Bad Actors appeared first on AdExchanger.

Gartner research Vice President Marty Kihn has gone to the agency world to take an unspecified role at Dentsu Aegis Network. Gartner confirmed the move, but neither Kihn nor Dentsu Aegis responded to requests for comment. “Marty Kihn did leave Gartner and accepted an opportunity with Dentsu Aegis,” a Gartner spokesperson said in an email… Continue reading »

The post Marty Kihn Leaves Gartner For Dentsu appeared first on AdExchanger.

Earlier this month, a baby boy in the UK said his first word–it was Alexa. As technology continues to evolve and become more intelligent, people aren’t ignorant about the impact it’s having on children, including privacy and developmental concerns. For those of us born before the advent of smart homes and other smart technology, it’s…

Add another brand celebrating women driving in Saudi Arabia. Burger King is offering a free Whopper sandwich for every woman behind the wheel who goes through its drive-thrus in the kingdom. The fast-food chain isn’t changing the burger, called the WhoppHER, itself–just the wrapper, with an emphasis on the program’s logo and “Celebrating Our Driving…