How Ally Bank turned favorability into conversion with its largest campaign ever

Ally Bank is known as a digital-first financial services company with no brick-and-mortar locations. Naturally, this might make you think that it’s a younger or at least youngish company, but it’s actually the opposite. 

Ally has been around since 1919—though, at the time, it was known as GMAC and operated as a division of GM. After transitioning from car financing to mortgaging to banking, GMAC Bank transformed into Ally Bank in 2009. Its three founding principles were “Do right, talk straight, and be obviously better.”

Since then, Ally’s marketing and advertising has focused on being authentic to these principles, using phrases like “We speak human” and “Our promise is in our name.” This is the same type of messaging it leaned into when it launched a massive advertising push in 2021. 

This week, Case Studied explores how Ally turned favorability into conversion with its largest campaign in brand history.

The Brief:

It’s pretty rare for a brand with such a long history to reinvent itself in such a big way (and during a financial crisis no less), but Ally pulled it off. After about 12 years of operating as Ally Bank, it set out to make itself known on damn near every advertising channel. 

The tagline behind Ally’s biggest campaign was “We’re all better off with an ally.” Building this creative with help from the agency Anomaly, each ad featured real people—no professional actors or models. They showed real-life moments when having an ally is most important. To tie it into the brand even more, the campaign used words that end in “a-l-l-y” to help tell each story. 

Coming off the heels of 2020, Ally was looking to share a hopeful message. 

“Unfortunately, 2021 picked up where 2020 left off,” said Ally CMO, Andrea Brimmer. “As many Americans continue to struggle, the idea of allyship was never as important as it is now. Our customers share their appreciation for the fact that we were there for them at the start of the pandemic, helping them navigate all of the moments that require managing their money. Their feedback helped us crystallize the meaning of our brand promise and served as the inspiration for this new campaign.”

The Execution:

Given the sheer breadth of the campaign, it’s no surprise that Ally leveraged a ton of marketing channels. But the campaign was also integrated into the brand’s existing collaborations, which include:

🦸🏿 a joint program between WarnerMedia, DC Comics, and Milestone Media that supports Black and diverse creators in the comic book genre

🏁 its sponsorship of NASCAR driver Alex Bowman

⚽ its sponsorship of football clubs Charlotte FC and Detroit City FC 

Outside of those collabs, Ally ran over 700 out-of-home (OOH) units across nine cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and New York City. The OOH activations included billboards, bus ads, subway ads, you name it. 

On top of its existing sponsorships, Ally continued to lean into sports by advertising during live college and professional football, and post-season baseball. Its ads were on prime-time programming, homepage takeovers, and social (including a TikTok challenge with the hashtag #myfinallymoment). 

Here’s a look at some of the ads that came from this campaign:

🚌 a full bus ad ft. big hair 

🎆 a well-timed Times Square billboard

📖 a video that includes 10 different words that end in “a-l-l-y” 

🚇 a subway station takeover 

🚢 a billboard on a boat

While Anomaly worked with Ally to develop the concept and creative for the campaign, MediaCom led the media buying process, R/GA led the social and digital components, and MKTG led sponsorship integrations (talk about a group effort).

The Results:

According to Ally, the campaign had a reach of over 1 billion impressions across all properties. The brand worked with TransUnion and a research company called Dynta to determine the impact of the brand campaign on favorability. 

They found that people exposed to the campaign were 6x more likely to open one or more accounts with Ally, and they had higher favorability scores than those who weren’t exposed to it. Over time, a whopping 73% of “favorables” converted. 

The brand also saw a 7% lift in favorability among people who hadn’t ever banked with them after being exposed to the campaign. And its cost of customer acquisition was reduced by 87% when it targeted people who were already aware of and familiar with its brand. 

“Think about it like an annuity that grows over time,” Brimmer said. “Simply by exposing people to brand creative on a repeated basis creates favorability and growth.”

The Takeaways:

Playing the long game and being as pervasive as possible paid off for Ally. Here’s how you can take the same approach:

1. Don’t let your brand get stale

If a bank founded in 1919 can reinvent itself amidst a global pandemic and rapid transformation of the entire world, what’s your excuse?

You need to constantly be reevaluating each core component of your business, whether it’s your products, messaging, design, etc.

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day stress of your job, but create space to step back and see the bigger picture.

2. Think beyond direct response

Brands are obsessed with direct response advertising. The idea of generating a conversion with a 7-day click attribution window (thanks for the addiction Facebook) is exciting, but it’s not realistic.

What Ally’s campaign proves is there is incredible value in building a relationship with a prospect first, teaching them about your brand and what it stands for, and naturally that will evolve into conversion.

Each piece of marketing you create needs to serve a different purpose, but perhaps there is room for your teams to think about the top of your funnel differently.

3. Put together your all-star team

If you were keeping score at home, we mentioned 4 different agencies that worked on this project. And while we can only assume that the cost of those were in the tens of millions, there is something important to take away here other than the budget.

Whether it’s full-time employees, contractors, or agencies, you need to surround your brand with experts who are perfectly equipped to solve your problem. Each of those solutions presents unique pros and cons, both from an impact and cost standpoint.

With so many resources in the world like Vendry, that make hiring the perfect partner easy, there is no reason you can’t create amazing work.