What you need to know:

• After a 15-year absence from market, ANZ has brought back its iconic Falcon creative device in its new campaign program promoting the increasingly sophisticated, personalised customer protection capabilities in play at the bank.
• ANZ GM of marketing, Sian Chadwick, who joined the bank’s freshly centralised marketing function 11 months ago, says the return of the Falcon is “a good first start” towards one of her key priorities: Being clear in market on who ANZ is, what the bank stands for, and making sure it’s building awareness “with a long runway in mind”.
• To get there, ANZ conducted a creative audit and brought in Ehrenberg-Bass Institute to assist with recognising its most relevant, distinctive creative and brand assets that can also deliver future relevance.
• Chadwick revealed she’s also instigating a significant brand strategy review with the aim of improving distinctiveness and how ANZ shows up in market.
• Another instrumental part of delivering marketing is connecting work to commercial outcomes. To do this, ANZ is upping the ante with Analytic Partners to ensure it has what Chadwick describes as “commercial mix modelling” that demonstrate marketing’s worth across the business, not just advertising.

Driving ANZ’s brand distinctiveness, instigating whole-of-customer thinking over product-led propositions, and increasing commerciality of marketing’s work by proving value across all the Ps, not just advertising, are all in Sian Chadwick’s sights as the bank’s GM of marketing.

Catching up with Mi3 following the return of ANZ’s iconic Falcon in a new campaign highlighting the personalised customer protection services now on offer, Chadwick revealed she’s in the midst of a brand strategy piece of work at an Australian retail level. Customer protection in the face of rising cybercrime and fraud, as well as the big four bank’s mobile-first banking proposition aimed at younger demographics, ANZ Plus, are set to continue as key pillars.

“The rest we're taking stock of at the moment and doing a good piece of work in that space,” she says. Timeframe wise, brand strategy work continues for the next few months, with production timelines coming off the back of that.

“But you'll definitely be seeing a lot more of us in market in the coming months and years as we’re looking forward to really showing up more as ANZ.”

The brand review is one of the ways Chadwick is making her mark after joining ANZ nearly a year ago. An external hire as GM of marketing, she sits in a newly restructured marketing team that’s transitioned away from a small distinct brand team and embedded marketers across the business, to a marketing centre of excellence bringing product, channel and brand marketers together.

“The benefit of that has been much more integrated planning, thinking more holistically about the customer, and being able to make some smart strategic decisions, which is just harder when you when you're all separated,” Chadwick says.

One of the new-look team’s first conversations was around ANZ’s presence in market and what the business wants to be talking to Australians about. Security was an obvious place to start, Chadwick says, noting the sheer volume of fraud and scams Australians are now being confronted with. Scams are not just targeting older demos either, but increasingly impacting the lives of younger demographics. Add this fact to ANZ’s purpose to support the financial well-being of Australians, and it made sense to prioritise this messaging in market.

“A core foundation stone is obviously to protect our customers’ money and keep them safe. You can't provide financial well-being without that protection overlay,” Chadwick says. “So it’s obviously a very important topic, and we’ve also seen lot of corporates starting to really increase their role in cyber.”

In concert, Chadwick and ANZ’s brand advertising lead conducted a creative audit. Together with longstanding agencies, Special Group, Thrive and PHD, all 25 years of advertising archives were scoured for ideas and distinctiveness. She’s also brought in Ehrenberg-Bass to undertake research on which creative and brand assets resonate and which could have ongoing relevance.

“Part of the rationale was to understand what was ‘distinctively ANZ’, what had stood the test of time and how could we think about carrying that work forward,” Chadwick explains. “A big thing that stood out was the humour and insight. We have been very much customer insight led, and adopted a certain humour that makes the creative very approachable and relevant to Australians. Through that, Falcon came through loud and clear.”

Bringing Falcon back

First launched by ANZ in 2006, Falcon appeared in several years of advertising before being retired nearly 15 years ago. Despite this, Ehrenberg-Bass found Falcon awareness and its distinctiveness has increased over the last few years.

“Unprompted, spontaneous awareness of Falcon as a brand asset for ANZ was coming through. We started testing Falcon with young and new Australians, and the metaphor also resonated around vigilance, safety, protection and security,” Chadwick says. “As the custodian of the brand, I wanted to honour the heritage but find modernity in some of that DNA and creative we can build into the future. It’s about continuing to evolve the brand while paying respect to where we’ve come from. Falcon resonated so much with audiences and with colleagues.

“That’s a good place to play. In re-reading about distinctiveness versus differentiation that [Mark] Ritson and Ehrenberg-Bass talk about, I like the idea about to pick where you want to play, then being really present and loud around that, rather than trying to spread yourself too thin with your messaging. The heritage in Falcon and the fact we can really show how it has evolved has lots of positives.”

The latest campaign, created by Special Group, positions the ANZ Falcon as personalised birds assigned to each customer to detect and prevent fraud. The technology behind this is based on monitoring millions of transactions every day and learning personalised customer behaviours and habits to build a unique picture of that individual. Some campaign materials over-index on the technology and protection specifics, as a result, such as ANZ’s FICO advanced predictive analytics technology, 24 x 7 security support, and global protection on transactions. There’s also a notable array of younger consumers featured visually.  

Last year, ANZ said it prevented $106 million in losses to cyber criminals, a 38 per cent increase year-on-year.

The latest Falcon campaign flight is running across TV, radio, out-of-home, print, social and owned channels. The bullseye target is uplifting brand awareness with younger demographics.

“That group has felt immune over the last couple of years to the risks of fraud. But really seeing the numbers increase in terms of the prevalence of fraud and the concerns of that customer demographic as well in this space, it's just radically increased over the last 18 months,” Chadwick comments.

Sitting more at the top-of-funnel level, the major metrics ANZ is going after are consideration and reputation, “but we recognise there will be halo impact onto revenue,” Chadwick says. The team has set forecasts which have been communicated internally and will be measured through the campaign period.

“What I really liked about the campaign is that it became a whole of division piece of work. We do have specific aspects of the campaign that launched a couple of days ago, for our ANZ Plus products, and for our credit card portfolio. That’s getting lower into the funnel. We’re also talking to specific digital technology security enhancements, such as dynamic CVV, where your CVV is changing regularly and selfie ID, if you want to make a big purchase. They're very specific to ANZ Plus, which is a very different proposition in market. So we've got a multi-layer campaign, and I was delighted to see the teams come together to work in that way,” she says.

“And we have teams across the business participating in this; this is not just an advertising campaign. We’ve been making sure we've been working with our customer protection specialist team as well.”

Commercial mix modelling

To help with measurement and demonstrating marketing’s ROI, ANZ is using what Chadwick describes as “commercial mixed modelling” with Analytic Partners. Every conversation Mi3 has had with marketers in the last six months has brought up the subject of market mix modelling and increased sophistication in this area and Chadwick’s desire to improve commercial measurement is no different.

“Analytic Partners has worked with ANZ for a while and has a rich history. We are continuing to enhance that. It’s about moving it from being a just market mix [model] to starting to think about this as commercial mixed modelling. The use cases can be so much broader than just what the media channel you are thinking about using, or thinking about the impact of price versus a marketing campaign, really understanding different geographies, and so on,” she says. “There's so much sophistication to the modelling now. By bringing our finance and product colleagues to the table, we’re really embedding that now as just part of the way we do business and make good decisions.

“By bringing a broader set of stakeholders to the table, we're trying to see how far it can go as a decision-making tool that is able to compare business growth levers, rather than just marketing. We're enjoying that journey and interested to see where we get to with it. Analytic Partners is a great partner and we're really happy about working with them on this.”

Chadwick also loves the fact the insights is leading to conversation that also help inform investment trade-offs. One of her three key priorities as GM of marketing is to continue increasing the commerciality of the work being done by ANZ’s marketing function.

“Analytic Partners have been doing a brilliant job in partnership with our finance team on really getting down to the value marketing is delivering to the business. The more we can do in that space, the better off we are internally and overall as a marketing community,” she says.

Another big focus for Chadwick, illustrated through the Falcon example, is being very clear in market on who ANZ is, what the bank stands for, and making sure it’s building awareness “with a long runway in mind”.

“The other thing which I'm really enjoying looking at with a bunch of colleagues across the business is just whole-of-customer and thinking very holistically about who these customers, talking about their full wallet and where they are in their lifecycle either with a bank or more generally,” she adds. “It’s moving away from what most corporates focus on, which is an individual product line. It’s about managing and thinking holistically about lifecycle.”