Ally Financial has made a name for itself as a fast growing digital-first financial services brand with a fun sense of humor. You may remember their “Do It Right” commercials from the fourth quarter of last year—showcasing their employees going to absurd lengths to lend consumers a hand, or even just to do a group cheer. Now, the brand is taking its promise to another level, with their new “Seriously Anything” campaign (launching Monday, August 7th), showing how Ally’s employees will do, you guessed it, “seriously, anything” to make their customers happy—even perform an excorcism, or help them hang out with Arsenio Hall.
brandchannel had the opportunity to sit down with Ally Financial’s CMO Andrea Riley and learn the strategy behind the campaign, and how Ally’s employees are able to live up to the promises made in their commercials.
How is Ally Financial looking to further build its brand with this new campaign, a sequel of sorts to last year’s “Do It Right” campaign?
There was a lot of success in the launch of the “Do It Right “campaign, it worked on a lot of levels. One, it really started to establish Ally as a digital financial services company, broadening our product offerings and connecting the dots for consumers around all the new things that Ally was in the process of launching. Two, it really worked to help humanize our brand. That was something that we thought was really important. Our people, for us, are our key differentiator in the marketplace, because it’s a very customer-centric company, and showing our people doing anything for the customer really starts to resonate and create an emotional connection. And third, it really continues our approach around clever wit and being disruptive in the marketplace. We’ve always done a lot of things to be disruptive with our advertising approach, and this continued on that path. So it’s a refresh of those earlier ads with a new format, which is this idea that we’ll do anything, seriously, anything for you and your finances.
How does Ally define itself as a digital financial services company, and what does mean for your brand?
We’ve got a pretty interesting business model because when we launched eight years ago, we made a decision that we would not have any brick-and-mortar outlets. So we are 100 percent online. We took a bet that people were going to start to transact digitally, whether it was over a phone, a tablet, or a laptop, and luckily that was the right bet. You see more and more of the financial services category scrambling to move to that digital orientation, but for Ally, it really is how our brand was born and how our brand continues to operate today.
How important is humor to the Ally Financial brand?
Clever wit has always been a big part of our brand personality, and it’s allowed us to really be disruptive in the marketplace because it’s not been an approach that many other financial services companies have taken, historically or even currently. We’re in a category that spends ferociously, and we really don’t spend on those same levels, so we have to break through in unique ways. Humor is universal. I believe great humor has an appeal to everybody, whether you’re really young or whether you’re a little bit older or someplace in between. This idea of creating that emotional connection through the humor has always been something that’s been part of our brand.
All of the ads feature Ally’s employees and how far they’ll go to help the customer—often to absurd lengths. How are you trying to live up to that message internally and deliver on that promise?
So “Do It Right” is one of our brand pillars. It has been since we launched the brand eight years ago. And our brand pillars are pretty simple. The first one is obsess over the customer. The second one is to tirelessly innovate. And the third one is do it right. We kind of had this “A-ha!” moment where we said let’s adopt that mantra of “do it right” as the tagline as well. And we felt like it’s a bold promise and it’s something that a lot of other brands, especially in the financial services category, can’t really go out and say. But to your point, you would have to be able to back it up if you go out and say something like “do it right” and you aren’t putting the customer at the center of everything — it’s a surefire way to make a blunder and have that blow up in your face.
Well, there’s a number of different things parts to this approach. One, with the exception of the TV, all the rest of the work, the online video, all of the print assets, all of our online assets, et cetera, do feature our own employees. We did an internal casting call, and people had to share their stories of how they’re doing it right for our customers. And then we sat and we selected the 100 best, whether they were really small things to really big things on how people are doing right by our customers. And those are the people that ended up in the execution.
The second thing that we’ve done internally is we spend a whole week doing what we called “Do It Right” week. We went on the road and talked to the employees about the importance of the campaign, the importance of living up to the promise, how we’ve pulled that through into the way that we think about the different benefits and human resource related things that we have. As well as how we pull that through every day into being a purpose-driven company and the importance of giving back to the communities in which we work and live.
Our CEO talks about brand as a weapon, and the only way you can have a strong brand is with that strong focus on making sure the associate base brings it to life.
How do you see customer expectations you know changing for financial services brands and in what ways are you changing to meet them?
Well we’ve seen tremendous change, particularly in the last eight years, in terms of consumer expectation in this category. First of all, I think when we entered the category, think about when the time we launched, it was during the worst financial crisis since the Depression. And people were either completely apathetic about their money, or they were just completely aggravated with the category. So we saw an interesting opportunity to solve for customer pain points, and to start to create an emotional bond where we were connecting with people and making them feel good about their dealings with a financial services company again. So I think that was the first insight.
There are a lot of financial services companies that talk about putting the customer at the center of everything, but it’s just talk. That for us has been a key differentiator—we actually do put the customer at the center of everything, and we solve for some really interesting pain points, like ATM fees and customer service. We even solve for simple things, like the ease and elegance of our online experience. For example, we have a “dejargonator”, where when you scroll over a term that you don’t understand, it will break it down for you and put it into simple terms. So I think we created a lot of momentum around having a different set of expectations, and we’re really proud of that.
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