Credit Cards And The Advertising World

With consumers starting to spend less on luxury items how does the Credit Card industry respond to this? In focus we will look at the advertising world and the new digital media platforms coming out of the big Australian advertising agencies

A person asked me last week how would I market a credit card in this financial market? Well I would focus on the average consumer and obviously use up to date market research. The days have gone of the single male signing up to any old credit card just because it’s convenient. Know days we know credit cards can be compared online with a click of a button. This enables both an increase in competition which benefits the consumer and an easy and convenient method of finding the best credit card that is suited for their needs.

If we were to look at large media agencies 10 years ago their main focus for credit card clients we would be to push as many TV ads as possible and hit as many targeted consumers on a broad scale. This would often involve a large scale budget, minimum strategy and large scale mass reach projects across a single media platform. How times have changed in an internet savy, Generation Y consumption world. The internet is now the home of consumers with an increase in advertising dollars being invested year on year. Sure, large scale Credit Card companies are looking for a great return on investment through paid search advertising (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but what the best credit card clients are looking for is an engagement through their brand. So, I guess we can simplify the online advertising world into two parts - Return on investment and brand engagement.

One method will give you the advertiser a direct sale and easy way of tracking conversions whilst the other engages the consumer within the brand in the hope they will purchase that particular credit card over the phone or another point of sale. A lot of marketing managers face this issue and generally pump more money into Search to essentially make the company look good from a revenue point of view. One important error in this is the revenue that they generate is usually only one off sales whilst brand engagement strategy to ensure a long term success not only of a brand but long term stability in a declining market.

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