Banks Are Wasting 50% of Their Marketing Budget

Jim Marous (00:11):

Consumers don't want more banking messages, they want relevance. And right now, most banks are wildly out of sync with what the communities actually need. Consumers want communication that reflects their neighborhood, their life stage, and immediate financial needs. And broad one-size-fits-all marketing just isn't effective because it's not what's wanted.

Jim Marous (00:37):

Hyper-local strategies are emerging in some of the most powerful ways to drive acquisition, strength, and relationships and capture market share, which builds loyalty.

Jim Marous (00:50):

In this episode of Banking Transformed, I'm talking to Fred Cadena, the Head of Global Strategy at Vericast, on how real-time data, household insights, and neighborhood-level trends are changing the way banks compete and communicate.

Jim Marous (01:07):

Fred's going to explain why relevance beats reach, and how new mover and life-stage signals drive growth, and what it takes to activate a hyper-local strategy without adding complexity and maybe even reducing costs.

Jim Marous (01:23):

If your institution is seeking affordable data-driven strategies that will boost growth in 2026, this conversation provides a clear roadmap and questions longstanding assumptions about how banks engage with their communities. So, Fred, before we start (while I know you pretty doggone well), can you introduce yourself to our audience?

Fred Cadena (01:46):

Sure. Thanks, Jim. It's a pleasure to be on the show, a big fan. What is it they say? Long-time listener, first-time caller. So, a little bit about my background: I've spent my life in and around financial services, at least my entire professional career. I spent about 16 years on the client side as an executive, primarily in the wealth space. And then I spent the last 16 years primarily in consulting.

Fred Cadena (02:12):

So, I spent time at some big shops people have heard of. Accenture, most recently I was the partner at IBM, leading our Financial Services Salesforce practice for North America. And I've spent the last two years here at Vericast.

Fred Cadena (02:28):

And what I love about it is not that I didn't have impact when I was on the client side, but being in consulting and now my role at Vericast, I love the disproportionate impact that I have in working with and talking to dozens of clients every week.

Fred Cadena (02:45):

And one of the things I love about being on this podcast is it just gives me a chance to reach and hopefully, influence a lot of other people in the banking world.

Jim Marous (02:57):

Well, it's interesting. If people peel back my background, they'll see I spent a decade at Vericast when it was named Harland Clarke Marketing Services. And had very much the same feeling that my impact was far outsized what I could do personally. But with all the tools that Vericast has, it was really exciting because they have so much data that is unused by financial institutions.

Jim Marous (03:23):

So, let's start with the elephant in the room. Banks and credit unions always claim that they're community-focused, that they're looking out for the consumer, that they're looking for those ways to help the consumer with their financial needs. But marketing tells honestly, a completely different story. What's the fundamental disconnect here?

Fred Cadena (03:46):

It's a fantastic question. I think in a lot of ways, it's kind of the million-dollar question. I think that by and large, most financial institutions, I think that's in their fabric. I think people that dedicate their lives in financial institutions really want their customers or their members to do better financially.

Fred Cadena (04:06):

They want to find ways to help them achieve whatever their life goal happens to be. Whether it's buying their first home, whether it's sending kids to college, whether it's retirement, those are all things that are critically important to all of us.

Fred Cadena (04:21):

I think where the disconnect is, is there's a whole concept around when you get too close to something, you kind of get steeped in that energy. And people in banking (and I've been in financial services, like I said, my whole career), you get this bank speech. You start thinking in bank terms.

Fred Cadena (04:42):

You start communicating with people as if they were also bankers, forgetting that they're just normal human beings. That they're spending as much energy thinking about taking the kids to sports practice or what's happening at their job, or how they're going to take care of Mom as they are thinking about what debit card they're going to use, or how they're going to get that mortgage.

Fred Cadena (05:05):

And so, a lot of times, banks end up communicating in ways that sound artificial, and in ways that don't really reflect how real people think about financial products.

Jim Marous (05:16):

It’s interesting because it's not just that. Going back to my days working in the marketing field for financial institutions, we somehow (as financial marketers) tend to get caught up in products rather than life stages and lifestyles. We get caught up in programs as opposed to processes.

Jim Marous (05:39):

One of the things I had a hard time selling in the marketplace was finding ways to communicate every single day to an individual consumer about an individual product that was most likely to be bought that day, that time, for that reason.

Jim Marous (05:55):

It’s so much easier to not only do a program (well, we thought it was so much easier) that would be hitting the masses with one message to massive consumer base around one product or one solution, and then to track it accordingly.

Jim Marous (06:12):

But the results, in retrospect, were nowhere near as good as they would be if we went by little daily segments and tracked it at the end. What is the obstacle that gets in the way for financial marketers to actually move the needle, not only on individual messaging, but on individual targeting?

Fred Cadena (06:32):

Yeah, it's a great question. I'd ask you first just to be a little kind to yourself, because just the technology and the data available for most of your career, and quite frankly, most of mine as well, it would've been impossible to do. Now, institutions have the data. They may not always know how to harness it, they may not always know what to do with it.

Fred Cadena (06:55):

And we also have execution channels where we can get that granular. So, what's stopping people? And one of the things I already mentioned is knowing what to do with the data. A lot of the data that we use at Vericast is data that institutions have access to. We do have a lot of data that we invest in, and we have some proprietary data, but it's not just having the data. It's being able to understand how to extract insights from the data.

Fred Cadena (07:25):

What is the data really telling you? And that requires both infrastructure in order to stage the data and get it in a format that you can do something with. And it takes people (data analysts, data engineers, data scientists) to build out those models and extract the insights from the rows and rows and rows of data that each institution out there has.

Fred Cadena (07:48):

And then the next thing is it's scale. If you think about, now I know who the different individuals I want to reach, and I know what those particular things that are important to them are, how do I then scale the creative so that that creative message is going to resonate across all those different individual audiences? How do I deploy that?

Fred Cadena (08:13):

We have great digital channels now that let us get very one-to-one, but somebody still has to line those things up. How do I line up this message with this creative to this person? And so, without the proper systems in place, that becomes very difficult to do.

Jim Marous (08:29):

And interestingly, you talk about where we've come and where we're going. We now have the technology to drive the message out, to actually deploy it accordingly. It's interesting because so many times we talk about data, we talk about analytics, we talk about targeting, and then we use it to just drive really good reports and not deployment. We don't get the message out there.

Jim Marous (08:53):

The fact that my financial institution knows me is great, but I don't know they know me. They don't show me they know me. They don't market to me as they know me. If there's a specific marketing channel that financial marketers should focus on when trying to bridge the gap between broad and hyper-local, what is it?

Fred Cadena (09:17):

Well, it's a great question. So, I would answer the question a little differently between customers, members, and acquisition. I think financial institutions could do a significantly better job taking advantage of all the channels they own. Whether that's their mobile banking, their online banking, email, being more efficient, designing journeys.

Fred Cadena (09:42):

That’s great. Like you said, show me you know me for people that you know. From an acquisition perspective, even if you do have the data (which many institutions probably don't invest in that for acquisition), you don't want to get overly familiar with people you don't know. It comes off as a little creepy.

Fred Cadena (10:02):

But what you do want to do is you want to get messages in front of them that are going to resonate. That are going to look like their community. That are going to talk about the types of challenges that they're trying to solve in the language that they actually use to solve it. And we found one of the best channels to do that is paid social.

Fred Cadena

Paid social works almost across the entire funnel. It’s great during consideration; it works well for discovery. And because you can click right through (assuming that you've got a great experience on the other side of that click), it's a great conversion channel as well. So, that's where we've been investing a lot of our efforts over the last year in building our capabilities.

Jim Marous (10:45):

So, when you look at that specifically at paid social, when you're talking about using paid social, what are many financial institutions getting wrong?

Fred Cadena (10:59):

Yeah, the big thing is they're not being local enough. And again, it's one of those things that scales. If you're a small institution, you have a couple of branches, you're probably local enough all the time. If you're a large community, super community regional institution, it doesn't work well to paint the same message across your entire market area. You need to get something that that's going to really resonate in each of the communities that you serve so that it delivers meaningful engagement.

Fred Cadena (11:30):

The other part is in the audience selection. A lot of times, these … Meta especially doesn't do a great job in helping financial institutions really get in front of the right communities. Meta has a – if you're a financial institution or if you fall into some other regulated industries, they'll give you what they call a special ad category designation.

Fred Cadena (11:58):

And what that means is when you're using their tools to build your audience, they limit you to no tighter than a 15-mile radius. Well, if you look at a lot of areas, especially urban and even suburban areas, 15 miles is not very local.

Fred Cadena (12:13):

And so, you need to find a different way to build your audience selection so you can really pick the audience that includes the people that you want to reach, that you can include the people that you have a right to win as an institution, and you're not wasting ad spend reaching people that are not going to convert.

Jim Marous (12:33):

So, how do you overcome? When you look at the Medicare funnel and local images and all that, how do you overcome what most institutions may be missing in the mark by not running truly localized campaigns?

Fred Cadena (12:51):

Yeah, absolutely. So, the first thing we do is we look at each geography, and we use our data sources to identify where's the highest propensity for whatever the institution is trying to bring in. So, if it's checking accounts, we don't just look at checking. We look at what type of checking is it? Is it an interest-bearing checking account? Is it a rewards checking account? Is it a free checking account?

Fred Cadena (13:17):

What type of features does that account have? Does it have early access to pay? Does it have a really compelling debit card with rewards? And we'll try to then compare that to what do we see in the search data.

Fred Cadena (13:31):

What are people in those communities looking for? What are they talking about? What are they interested in? And we want to make sure that we're aligning the product and its features with the community and its needs and its desires.

Fred Cadena (13:44):

And then once we've identified that, we then want to build the creative. And we're going to go right back to that search data to tell us, this is how the community talks. This is what they're punching in when they go to Google to search for something. We'll use that same type of language as we're constructing the creative. So, we make the creative look and sound like the community that is going in.

Fred Cadena (14:05):

We also want to make sure we're bringing in rich imagery and not stock images. We want really great pictures of the branch, really great pictures of the local area, of employees that your members, your customers, are going to see when they walk into the branch after they see that ad.

Fred Cadena (14:22):

We even find institutions have invested (in some cases) in taking pictures of their customers or members and featured them in the ads. All of that stuff works way better than using just generic imagery in your creative.

Jim Marous (14:37):

So, you said it when we met together at an event a few months ago, and the overall theme of this whole hyperlocal theme is that relevance beats reach in retail banking. What are some of the most important moments where hyperlocal relevance truly has moved the needle?

Fred Cadena (14:58):

I can't really paint with a broad brush. What I can tell you is we're seeing some really amazing results when we align everything that I talked about, from an audience selection and a creative, with what institution is looking to achieve. So, one institution we've been working with had some very aggressive goals around auto-loan acquisitions.

Fred Cadena (15:21):

After working with them, designing the campaign, picking the right audience, picking the right creative, deploying it, they're seeing auto-loan acquisition costs around $28. Now, that's compared to an industry benchmark of 145 to $250. That's direct, that's not indirect auto loans.

Fred Cadena (15:41):

So, we're seeing not just the auto loan, but in many cases their new customers are getting four or five, six additional products, halo products. And we all know how difficult it is sometimes to get somebody that comes in from a lending acquisition channel to then bring the rest of their business to the institution.

Fred Cadena (16:00):

In other cases, we have institutions that are trying to build their credit card book. We're seeing credit card acquisition costs, in some cases as low as $70 compared to a benchmark of $200 or more.

Fred Cadena (16:11):

But it's important to really look at what's happening, not just for the campaign overall, but at every local level. When we build these campaigns and we deploy them, we continuously monitor for performance.

Fred Cadena (16:27):

I'll give you an example. We have one institution we're working with that has branches in many states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania. Using the same creative, the same campaign, the same objectives. We have areas in Michigan that are performing at $18 CPA and areas in Pennsylvania that we're running at $674. That's a huge difference.

Fred Cadena (16:52):

And so, by continuously monitoring, seeing where it's resonating, where it's not resonating, we can optimize the redeploy budget in real time. So, we'll move stuff out of Pennsylvania, move more into Michigan, and then take another look at Pennsylvania and refine and retarget and get a new campaign launched in Pennsylvania that'll deliver better results.

Jim Marous (17:16):

I think one of the things that people may miss in the conversation is the fact that you are doing these campaigns for multiple organizations across the country at all times, and you're continually being able to play against yourself and say, “How do I beat the results we got at XYZ bank with ABC bank?” Or “what are the dynamics that we're looking to do?” Or “What tests do we want to perform?”

Jim Marous (17:41):

And you mentioned a campaign. I'm going to go back to it because it's a hot button for me because actually the database was first introduced when I was with the company that preceded Vericast, which is the auto-loan process you were just discussing.

Jim Marous (17:58):

Can you just discuss a little bit about the database and how it's constructed, but how it becomes an ongoing process (an engine, if you will) in your marketplaces?

Fred Cadena (18:10):

In designing our audience selection methodology for hyperlocal, we started with a base of search data. We wanted to know since search has been for so many years such an effective bottom-of-funnel channel. We've been using it as a demand indicator as far as what's happening in the market for several years. But we assumed we could get more out of that search data.

Fred Cadena (18:36):

So, what we did is we built a data set that had (when we built it) four years of historical search data across the entire US at the zip code level. So, a lot of times when people are looking at search data, they'll get it nationally, or they'll get it regionally.

Fred Cadena (18:55):

We wanted to build a data set that would let us get very precise in what we're seeing. And we built that data set for tens of thousands of keyword pairings around different financial services terms. And we started to look at that search data and how closely it correlated with activity. But it didn't always correlate with activity.

Fred Cadena (19:17):

And we thought to ourselves, “It's great to go see, where are people looking for stuff?” But then we also want to know, where are people actually taking action? So, we layered on top of that search data actual application data for loans, account opening data for deposit products to give us an indication of where are people looking for stuff, and then taking action.

Fred Cadena (19:40):

Actually, activating and not just being looky-loos. And then we wanted to layer on top of that: where are we going to see less competition? We all know every financial institution spends money on paid search. So, we used the average cost per click for paid search as an analog for competition, and we layered that on as a third dimension of the dataset.

Fred Cadena (20:03):

And what that gave us, it gave us a picture of zip code by zip code for each product and for each subproduct in the feature level that I was talking about earlier. Where is there great activity, people actually taking action on that activity, and relatively low competition? And we use that in order to pick the geographies that we pick.

Jim Marous (20:27):

Anybody who's listening to this podcast, especially you marketers out there, what you're talking about here is an organization that almost serves as a massive new marketing employee that can bring real-world data to what could be your marketing strategies that has been already tested, deployed, and retested to continually enhance.

Jim Marous (20:55):

And so, when we're talking here, these ideas, they're not pie in the sky. They're not things that can't be done almost immediately. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit here. When you look at what's going on in the marketplace now, obviously hyper-local marketing, or marketing overall, has changed significantly in the last 12 to 24 months with the advent and the rise of AI, real-time data, personalization.

Jim Marous (21:22):

What do you see happening in the next 12 months, 24 months? What's the evolution that you see taking place right now that organizations have to decide whether or not they're going to get on board or they're going to stand by the sidelines?

Fred Cadena (21:37):

It's a fantastic question. It's something that we literally ask ourselves all the time. I'll point to two things. One is this, is that between various converging trends, including the recent bestselling books that have talked about reducing screen time, not just for kids but also for adults, and all of the competition for attention, it’s only going to get harder to get the right eyeballs on your stuff.

Fred Cadena (22:14):

So, if you've been deploying in a more national or regional sense, if you haven't been paying a lot of attention to your audience selection, I predict that you're going to see your results get less and less effective over the course of the next year as that competition for eyeballs and attention only gets harder.

Fred Cadena (22:37):

The other thing that marketers are going to have to contend with over the next year is just the continued impact of AI on marketing and specifically in and around the effectiveness of paid search.

Fred Cadena (22:52):

Paid search has been a bit of an easy button for 15, 20 years now. You've put 25 cents in the paid search machine, and 50 cents of value comes out the bottom. And you just have to pick how many quarters you want to put in the top.

Fred Cadena (23:08):

But between search volume going increasingly to ChatGPT, to Anthropic, now to Gemini, and Google's baking that into every product it can — we have more and more search traffic going from keyword search in Google to these various chat platforms. And then even in Google, they're putting more and more real estate in AI overviews.

Fred Cadena (23:34):

What this means for marketers is you no longer control the message or the medium. You could for years optimize your paid search keywords, go out there and give people links. And as long as you're willing to pay to be near the top, you could drive them right to your webpage, right to your landing page, and give them the exact message that you wanted to give them.

Fred Cadena (23:57):

Now ,you're beholden to whatever ChatGPT or Google's AI overview wants them to know about your brand or not. So, those are two things that we're working very hard to help our clients work to overcome in the next year.

Jim Marous (24:12):

Okay. So, we're talking about data, we're talking about personalization, we're talking about hyperlocal. And I will guarantee you that 80% of the people listening to the podcast, 80% of bankers, sometimes (maybe all the time) get in their own way with regard to “Geez, do we want to take the risk of maybe hitting the wrong person with the wrong message? Do we want to maybe worry about, are we following regulations and compliance areas with regards to data?”

Jim Marous (24:47):

How can you help financial institutions rest a little bit more assured that what they're doing is legal, is regulatory compliant? And when you look at the consumer overall, you don't have to hit a home run every time. The consumer understands that not every targeting is perfect.

Jim Marous (25:09):

You can't do enough analysis to make it perfect until after the person's already taken action. How do you assure your clients, your prospects, that what we're doing meets the guidelines?

Fred Cadena (25:23):

And that's a critically important question. And I'll take the second part first, which was the compliance question. Because of the two, that's the one we absolutely have to get right. And what I'll say is this, is that we've been in this business of financial services for over 150 years. We've been helping financial services firms with marketing for well over 30.

Fred Cadena (25:48):

I'm actually in our home office today (I’m not usually here), and I needed a place to do this. And I borrowed the office of our chief compliance officer. We have compliance staff, we have legal staff. Everything that we do for our clients goes through an internal compliance review, much like it goes through a compliance review at our different client institutions.

Fred Cadena (26:13):

And it's critically important that whether it's audience selection, whether it's creative, getting the disclosures right, all of those things have to be 100% right, 100% of the time. There's no room for error. And we invest tremendous amount of money on that side of the equation.

Fred Cadena (26:34):

The other side of the equation, not that we want to get wrong, but I’ll guarantee you this, if you’re doing mass marketing, if you're putting the same message into a region, into a city, into national (if you're a national institution) without looking at local messaging, you're already getting the wrong message in front of the wrong people. Because there's no single message that's going to resonate with everyone.

Fred Cadena (27:03):

And so, what we do is we leverage a lot of data, a lot of insights to tell us these are the various subsegments, these are the various communities. This is what's unique about them. This is how they talk, what they're looking for, what they're interested in. To your point, is it going to be 100% right 100% of the time? Probably not.

Fred Cadena (27:27):

Unless we really want to get down to one-to-one in every single channel, there's always going to be a little bit of grouping and sending a message to a smaller group rather than a larger group. But I'll tell you what, it's way better than if you're not doing any of the work. And so, we work very hard to make sure that that's as accurate as it can possibly be.

Jim Marous (27:51):

Boy, I'll tell you what, your analogy of taking the mass marketing method versus the hyperlocal, and you're going to hit more grounders to second going on the mass market than you ever will on hyperlocal. And that's a really good point. I'm going to get on my soapbox here because it drives me absolutely nuts.

Jim Marous (28:12):

We are getting extraordinarily targeted communications and engagements with Uber, with Amazon, with Google, with every single … heck, when I'm calling the pizza joint, and they come back and they say, “Hey, do you want to order the same thing you did last time?” I don't get anxiety. I'm glad you saved me some time.

Jim Marous (28:32):

The reality of done right. We're not pushing buttons too much, but we're making it so we can save time and money for the consumer, and we're going to have relevant messaging. And that's so key right now.

Jim Marous (28:44):

And when we look at what financial institutions traditionally have done and many times are still doing it today, where they rely on mass media for messaging, how should leaders think differently about allocating their budgets between local and broad communication?

Fred Cadena (29:03):

It's a fantastic question. I tend to think (and it's the way that we design everything that we do here) that as much as possible, if you're talking about spending, specifically for acquisitions, specifically for an outcome with a call to action, you should try to get as local and measurable as possible.

Fred Cadena (29:29):

Because if you can't measure it, you can't optimize it. You don't know what you're doing well and what you're not doing well. And if it's too broad, it's just not going to resonate. All that being said, brand is so important.

Fred Cadena (29:44):

And I will say, I work with a lot of institutions, and every institution I talk to is looking to get bigger, not smaller. And that means either de novo branches in new areas or acquisitions and a rebrand into an area where they don't have a presence.

Fred Cadena (30:00):

You need to spend time building that brand when you're in a new area. That can be broader. That can take the form of sponsorships, that can take the look of traditional billboards or linear TV. Things that are not particularly measurable but are great to get that brand message out and across.

Fred Cadena (30:21):

But now, once you're wanting to go down funnel, once you want people to take a specific action, it's got to be local, and it's got to be measurable.

Jim Marous (30:30):

So, when you're engaging with one of your financial institutions, obviously you're trying to say, “We can help you with these stages of this marketing.” I'm hearing (tell me if I'm wrong, because I am often) you can help them with the data work. You can help them with selection criteria.

Jim Marous (30:48):

You can help them with targeting and with insight-driven marketing. You can actually help them take their raw, maybe unstructured database, even though it's structured, and make it work for them. But you also help on the implementation phase, where you actually can help them with individual targeting, marketing, messaging, creative, and actually deployment as well?

Fred Cadena (31:17):

Absolutely. We are able to be a full lifecycle agency, at least for the performance side of marketing. Because we believe so strongly in what I was saying a minute ago about being measurable, we don't really deploy in non-measurable channels. So, we don't deploy in newspapers and traditional billboards and linear television.

Fred Cadena (31:46):

But when it comes to digital channels, direct mail, things that you can measure and attribute back to, we execute across all those channels. And so, every client relationship is different. We have clients that have agency partners they'd like to work with.

Fred Cadena (32:04):

We also enjoy working with their agency partners to figure out where each of us has the most strengths. We have other clients that use this end-to-end. From design of the audience and the strategy, design of the creative all the way through to execution and measurement. And so, we'll right-size our engagements for what our clients need.

Jim Marous (32:30):

So, finally, I'm going to have you do what I had to do, but I went the other direction from bank to the marketing agency. I'm going to take you out of the financial marketing agency of Vericast, I'm going to put you in a bank.

Jim Marous (32:44):

It's a bank that really has traditionally done pretty much mass media, has done traditional financial marketing. Pretty much spends most of their time working with their own client base, but they do some prospecting because everybody needs somebody coming in the front door.

Jim Marous (33:00):

You're looking at 2026, you're behind the eight ball because it's kind of late in this year. What are the first things you will do to transform their marketing and get the lowest-hanging fruit? Because bottom line is your organization, let's say, doesn't really have the belief of the leadership that marketing is anything but a cost.

Jim Marous (33:19):

What are the first things you're going to do to prove the worth of the financial institution’s marketing department to make it so you can get more money for investment going forward?

Fred Cadena (33:28):

The very, very first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look at our product. And I know that not always, in banking, does product fall under marketing. And it may not fall under me in the scenario you gave me, but ultimately, that's what's going to convert. Whatever we're going to market has to be compelling relative to the competition in the marketplace.

Fred Cadena (33:57):

So, I'm going to look at our products both on the deposit and the lending side. And I'm going to look at our competition, and I'm going to say, “Here's where we have a right to win.” Maybe we have a compelling mortgage product, or we've got a really great HELOC, or we've got a checking account that has really differentiated offerings. And that's the first thing I'm going to do.

Fred Cadena (34:17):

And then once I figure out where do we have the best chance of resonating, of differentiating ourselves in the market, I'm going to go figure out exactly how I can get in front of the people that want to have that particular product.

Fred Cadena (34:33):

So, who's my audience that wants that early access to pay feature or that HELOC feature or that mortgage feature? And I'm going to do everything I can to get my message in front of that audience and not waste money getting money in front of people that aren't going to resonate with that product.

Jim Marous (34:52):

It’s interesting, Fred, you took me in a direction I wasn't really ready for on that one. That you didn't start with the marketing aspect. And it's funny because I remember the conversation at your event that I said, “Geez, got to remember that.” That it doesn't do any good if you get extraordinary marketing results, if you've made it so fricking hard to open the account that I'm losing the customers I generate.

Jim Marous (35:18):

And now we're getting to another hot button of mine, which is new-account-opening experiences. If you can't open that fricking checking account in three minutes, maybe four minutes, you've just put roadblocks in your way that you're generating interest that's going to go someplace else eventually. So, I love your answer because you're starting first to say, “What do I need to be my North Star?”

Jim Marous (35:39):

“Where am I having a strategic advantage that makes it so that people actually be able to do what I want them to do?” And then, “How do I make the data work for me?” And I think that's a really good insight.

Jim Marous (35:51):

For those of you who are listening to the podcast, we have a number of podcasts that we've done in the past (both for Vericast and elsewhere) with regard to improving your marketing wherewithal. We've had podcasts where we interviewed the head of Mastercard Marketing, who talked about Quantum Marketing, which is a great book that I highly recommend, still recommend.

Fred Cadena (36:11):

It’s a good book.

[Music playing]

Jim Marous (36:12):

Because we don't know what we don't know. And if there's one area that right now is moving faster than any, it's marketing. I tell people, “If you graduated with a degree in marketing two years ago, you better be going back to school on a daily basis to figure out what's going on in the marketplace. It’s changed.”

Jim Marous (36:32):

And knowing people like Fred, knowing people like Vericast, knowing organizations that actually can help me not only know what I should do but can help me deploy, especially if I'm a smaller organization without 25 marketers around me, this is an invaluable tool.

Jim Marous (36:48):

But even if I have 25 marketers around me, it's great to have an asset that says, “I can implement the ideas I have within my team at scale in a hyper-local fashion.”

Jim Marous (37:00):

Fred, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate your time and your insights, and I look forward to seeing you again.

Fred Cadena (37:06):

Thank you, Jim. I really appreciate you having me on. And thank you everybody who paid attention this long, and we'll see you soon.

Jim Marous (37:14):

Thanks for listening to Banking Transformed, the winner of three international awards for podcast excellence. If you enjoy what we're doing, we would really enjoy a positive review. Also, check out my recent articles in The Financial Brand, the research we’re doing for the Digital Banking Report.

Jim Marous (37:30):

This has been a production of Evergreen Podcasts. A special thank you to our senior producer, Leah Haslage; audio engineer, Chris Fafalios, and video producer Will Pritts.