Jo Boundy opens the vault on retail media offering Commbank Connect
This article first appeared on marketing website B&T here
Following the soft launch last October of CommBank’s retail media offering CommBank Connect, Australia’s most valuable brand invited some of Australia’s other big brands and media industry hot shots for a celebration of its successful foray into the world of persuasion at the bank’s historic Martin Place vault.
There were around 50 in attendance including representation from global and local brands across various sectors including fashion, auto, telco, retail, travel, tourism, FMCG, rideshare, technology, grocery and real estate sectors and representation from many agency partners from across Australian media industry.
Speaking at the function, CommBank CMO and B&T’s CMO Power List fixture Jo Boundy told those gathered CommBank Connect was all about leveraging the bank’s “incredible physical and digital infrastructure so that we can better communicate with our customers and, excitingly, we can actually also offer it as a platform for brands to also connect with our customers.”
Boundy also said it should come as no surprise 16 million Australians engaged with the bank frequently. “We have scale and reach and engagement. And I think if you just pause for a second and think about all the apps on your phones that you engage with monthly, weekly, daily, or even sometimes on an hourly basis, I’m pretty sure your bank app will be up there.
“When we started on this journey a couple of years ago, we thought that we had all the special ingredients to make a retail network. “We’ve got huge scale and reach. We have an incredible physical footprint. We have over 600 branches, we have 1800 ATMs around the country, and because of CommBank Connect, we’ve invested more in those branches, and in those physical experiences and we’ve now got 2000 digital screens that you can use as a CommBank Connect partner.”
Digitally, Boundy added people might be surprised that more than 8 million people access the bank’s app regularly, with some accessing the app as often as 43 times a month. Online, there was 12.3 people who logged in every single day.
— The CommBank’s historic Martin Place vault . . . imagine the secrets locked up within.
Through its partnership with Quantium, it’s no surprise the bank has a lot of transaction data. “We have 365 different audience segments that we can look against.” Boundy rounded out her introduction by adding that she thought the crucial ingredient the CommBank had to establish a successful retail network was trust and reputation. “We have very strong relationships with our customers. We protect people’s most valuable asset: their money . . .
“So, we’re pretty excited about CommBank Connect and following the soft launch late last year, we’ve already got some incredible insights . . . At the heart of it, ultimately, it’s all about our customers. We want to make sure we’re serving up more relevant content to our customers. We want to make sure we’re serving up offers and discounts from brands that they love.
“That’s where we can use the data to make sure we’re serving up the right offers from brands that are relevant. And ultimately, we see this is a way that we can keep improving the customer experience that CommBank customers have.
Since October 2024, Commbank Connect has served 418 million partnership impressions to date. Boundy also added that one client, Destination Canada, had seen its brand consideration for travelling to Canada, increase by 62 per cent amongst CommBank customers through the work they’ve done with CommBank Connect.
Also speaking at the event, Mike Connaghan, managing director, commercial content, NewsCorp Australia, said that there’s no doubt that retail media is the new black. “Everyone’s talking about it, but it’s not new. Medium Rare has been working with the bank, has been working with Coles, with Qantas for more than a decade.
“That Coles Magazine is a piece of retail media, like no other, it is the biggest magazine in Australian publishing history. So, it’s been around for a while,” he said. Connaghan also added it was no surprise that everyone’s talking about retail media because of the inherent nature of the data it provides as well as the scale.
Jonathan Hopkins, Co-Founder Sonder, added some weight to Connaghan’s views by telling the audience that retail media in the US would account for 25 of all the US advertising expenditure this year. “In five years, it’s gone from nowhere to a quarter, which is phenomenal. The market is projected at US$150 billion, but we reckon that’s grossly undervalued because a lot of businesses don’t tend to report their revenue.
“We’re seeing maturity in the grocery, liquor and retail sectors as those businesses get much more established, and it’s the finance, travel, airlines and the telcos that are really the next wave,” Hopkins said.
Connaghan attributed CommBank Connect’s early success to the decision by the bank to start with content. News Corps’ Medium Rare provides CommBank Connects content. “The beauty I think of what CommBank has done is that you guys started with content. You didn’t start with the media network. Who really needs another media network, who needs another screen to place an ad on? I think there’s going to be some retail networks making a mistake by just throwing screens up or throwing up an ad network and saying come and spend your money here.
“You’ve got to have an environment that you create, which is valuable to your customers and you guys started with content. The utility of that content making people’s lives easier, helping them through their day, helping them save money, helping them to a better life, the content, which any ad sits within is really, really important. I think you guys really cracked the code by starting with the content,” he said.
Makenna Ralston, CEO CommBank IQ, addressed the perils that lay with retail media’s absolute precision; sometimes personalisation can be seen as overstepping. “So, let’s start with a fundamental truth, which is customer data is a gift it is not a commodity. And I think we’ve probably all heard that, we understand that, but the reality is that gift comes with enormous responsibility,” she said.
There are absolutely strings attached in terms of how do you protect and care for that data and you respect the trust that customers are giving you to do so. And also how do you use it intelligently. Customer data comes with a value equation. When customers give you data particularly first-party data in such a trusted way as you’re seeing with CommBank, they expect you to use it for their benefit. To provide them better goods, better services, elevated custom experiences.
“And if you think about it, customers don’t, dislike advertising, they dislike irrelevant advertising. So when you use that gift intelligently, and you figure out the right message at the right moment based on that data, and it’s like not ‘close enough’, you really hit something very powerful, which is you increase that trust, that intelligence comes through the experience they’re having.
“That customer says this brand really understands me, but more so they have what I need, when I need it, in the way I want. And so I think the question really isn’t about should be personalised or how much should we personalise. It’s actually about, have we earned the right to use these insights? And I’m doing so in a way that is actually elevating experience the customers is having? How’s it helping them in the way that it. That’s the question we should be staring into, and that’s the experience bar that everybody in this industry, should be measuring up to,” Ralston concluded.
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