The Current Podcast

JPMorgan Chase's David Pinto-Carpenter shares how the banking giant is adapting to changing consumer expectations for financial services, what he thinks is holding back more investment in CTV and why he’s comfortable not being a first mover.

Episode Transcript

Please note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.

Damian (00:00):

I'm Damian Fowler.

Ilyse (00:02):

And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.

Damian (00:03):

And welcome to this edition of The Current Podcast.

Ilyse (00:10):

This week we're delighted to talk with David Pinto-Carpenter, the managing director of Media Strategy and Insights at JPMorgan Chase.

Damian (00:19):

Now over 225 years old and is situated across 100 global markets. JPMorgan Chase is one of the world's most respected financial institutions, and for the second consecutive year, fortune ranked JPMorgan Chase, the fifth most admired company in the world.

Ilyse (00:35):

After 10 years of agency life, David moved over to JPMC where he's focused on how the company invests in its digital marketing strategy to stay current with the fast moving media environment.

Damian (00:48):

We start by asking David about how his agency life informed his thinking at JPMorgan Chase

Ilyse (00:55):

After having spent nearly 10 years on the agency side of media. What inspired you to move over to the brand side and how has that experience kind of shaped your approach at JPMorgan Chase?

David (01:10):

Right, so well, that really ages me, so appreciate that. But I think I've always been interested in two sides of media. One is how media can influence consumer behavior and also how media can move business. And I think it's a bit hard to get a real accurate answer of how media moves business when you don't see the other side of the business. So agencies are, there's always typically a gap between clients and agency in terms of information sharing, what can be passed back and forth. So I was fortunate enough to, as my last agency assignment work on the Truth Initiative, which is a

(01:48):

Youth pro non-smoking nonprofit, and they were very open with their information. Essentially we're all working on a common cause. The cause is maybe the only thing in marketing where you actually save lives and therefore our information is your information, whatever can make us better, we'll do it. My clients gave us access to their web analytic platform. We had a full understanding of their tagging infrastructure and which actions were scored higher and lower and where we were trying to drive people and how people were traversing across the funnel as well as their data management platform. How do we create audiences? How do we collect data on an ad impression? How do we ultimately transform that into groups that we can use to target better? And for Truth, they're trying to reach 13 to 24 year olds with the message they don't want to hear. The hardest thing to get in action, and their action is to sign people up for advocacy.

(02:40):

I was able to see front and back everything that's happening and be able to use that to build tools and capabilities that allow us to model forward outcomes. We're basically able to say, okay, now we can not only project how much the outcome will cost, but also we can anticipate how people will respond to the ads as we put them out into market, and that included creative, that included everything else. We were able to reduce the amount of working media they needed to achieve their goal by 20%. We just said, take that back. You don't need it. You're a nonprofit, you don't need to spend it anymore. That was my last gig. And then at the time, my current manager, Tracy- Ann Lim, chief media officer at JPMC started to contact me asking if I was interested in coming to JPMC. So first questions I asked were, what kind of systems do you have?

(03:24):

What kind of access to information will I have? And then what is the objective? What does a team look like? So the team was very nascent, but the technology and the systems were very similar to truth, actually. It was a no-brainer getting access to or having the potential to access some portion of JPMC data to make marketing more effective and see how it works. And then a nonprofit, let's say JPMC’s, I dunno, a hundred times the size of the nonprofit, maybe that's some job security it'll take me, took one year to make something happen on the nonprofit. Maybe we'll take a hundred on JPMC, but it's a fun thing to do. I'm very grateful for that experience. I worked across a lot of different categories, a lot of different businesses, but I don't think we would've been as successful at moving things as fast as JPMC if Tracy and I didn't come from an agency background. There's nothing that can really prepare you for working at JPMC.

Damian (04:18):

One question I have about that. When you worked on the Truth Initiative project, it sounds like you would have a very clear mission statement. How do you think about that mission statement in your current context, in your current role?

David (04:33):

So we have, depending on how you count them, between 30 and 40 business units across JPMC globally, and all of them have some desire or ambition to market something out into the world. So I think we treat it as a series of levels. We have corporate level marketing and that's, you know, what does JPMC stand for? What is it doing in the communities? What information do we need to get out? So people do any number of things, either decide to open a banking relationship with us, decide to trust us with their investments or even come to work for our company. We compete on a lot of different fronts. So that's the top. And then from there, we cascade down to business groups, business units. But I think our purpose as recently defined by Carla is to make dreams happen for everyone everywhere, every day. And I think that's the culture that we try to carry through in the marketing decisions that we make. Yes, of course we want to open more accounts, but also we want to do right by our customers and make people understand that not only is this a great place to work, it's a great place to bank, but there's a lot of good that's happening from business that originates from JPMorgan Chase.

Ilyse (05:42):

It can be a tricky sector to markets because it's so heavily regulated - finance that is. I'm curious what your media strategy looks like. What kind of customer insights can you rely on to inform your overall media plan?

David (05:59):

Yeah, so we do a lot of design target work. We do a lot of segmentation, but I think specific to media, we treat our media strategy a lot more like financial planning and analysis in that we are – it’s a couple things: One, if we don't make more than we spend, we're a bank, we're probably not going to get that money again. So we treat an initial investment as very sacrosanct. We need to be very disciplined in the way that we spend it and use the best information we have to make sure it'll be a success. And then we try to get better over time. So we work with our finance partners in every business to understand what are the financials of each product, how are they changing, what do we know about the interaction effect of the channels that we market and the other channels that we use for marketing?

(06:44):

And how do we triangulate and forecast forward what we think that benefit will be and then prove that out over time through testing. In that respect, the notion of a campaign is important in the sense that it's an organizing construct to get work done and there's a message that runs and we create a message and it runs in the advertising space, and we're trying to get better at quantifying that impact. What does good creative look like and what does bad creative look like and what does that do for the business? But for us, we buy, for lack of a better word, blank space for another message to be put in. And so we've built a lot of muscle memory over time on what works in one business, how do we adapt it to another? Our business is similarly situated so that we can believe that this will be a predictable outcome for the foreseeable future. How long do we think this outcome will last? And then the proof is in, do we hit our numbers at the end of the year?

Damian (07:33):

You've touched on this a little bit Ilyse, but it's a sector, the finance sector is a conquesting sector in some ways, and on the face of it, there may seem to be little differentiation between one big bank and another. But I'm curious from your point of view in terms of branding, how do you think about JPMC setting itself apart? What are its differentiating points and how does that manifest itself in how you think about your work?

David (07:58):

Right. Yeah. So it's very important for me to keep one foot out of JPMC and not think like a marketer but think like a human being. And in that respect, if you open a checking account, you open a savings account, generally speaking, those are going to be pretty similar products from bank to bank. But I think where the real race is right now in financial services is experiences. So how do we deliver value to you by being an account holder of one of our products? And how is that different from the way that you are treated or the way that you might feel or the things that you can experience or unlock through other products? We have a pretty robust travel platform and dining platform. We invest heavily in bonus accelerators for travel and dining and other spaces. And we're starting to open progressively larger lounge business in addition to our branches. So we treat all of those as places where we can make an impression on people to give them an experience that is, for lack of a better word, white glove.

David (09:00):

That they couldn't get anywhere else and trying to make the differentiation on those experiences. And I think that's where the biggest battleground is.

Damian (09:07):

It's so interesting to me to hear you talk like that and how a company like JPMorgan Chase is actually thinking about lifestyle and experiences and in lots of ways you are marketing a membership or a membership of a kind of elite club, if you like. Is that fair?

David (09:24):

I think for some of our products, we compete in affluent and there's a lot of benefits that we give to affluent account holders that are meant to give unforgettable experiences, experiences they can’t get anywhere else. But I think even our core experience in branches, we want that to be a differentiating factor too. So we invest totally separate from marketing, but we invest a lot in making sure that our bankers have the right information about the customers that they're serving at their fingertips so that when someone comes in and has a question that they know the entire history of that person's relationship. And then in call centers as well, investing a lot in applied AI and ML to do the same thing. So if you call, we want to understand exactly who you are and help get you the help that you need as quickly as possible. We treat all of our products across the spectrum as trying to be differentiated in that way.

Damian (10:14):

So maybe it's a better way to talk about it as you think about the different customer experiences at different levels.

David (10:19):

Right, yes.

Ilyse (10:21):

Yeah, I would say that's definitely like a audience first approach to marketing. What about when it comes to buying ad space and media space?

David (10:31):

Yea, so without going into too much detail about the secret sauce, I'll say that we obviously have relationships with a quarter of the United States in terms of our customers and our households that bank with us and millions of small businesses as well. There's a lot of information that's proprietary to us that we are able to leverage and we take the protection of that data very seriously. There's a lot that we can't use and we can't access and we have to secure approval to get it. But I think generally speaking, our products are aligned to a series of firm-wide strategic segments, and we track growth against those segments. That's at the highest level and as you go progressively lower the matrix of the audiences that we might use or the audience we might prioritize becomes more matrixed and complex. But we have an audience centric approach to targeting. We are getting better in our capabilities to orchestrate journeys. So I think our ambition or our desire is to be as close to one and personal as we can be given the restrictions that we have in data access.

Ilyse (11:36):

So your digital marketing strategy definitely signals a future that is focused on measurable outcomes. I'm curious about how you're using channels like CTV and digital out of home to connect that brand awareness with that performance level.

David (11:54):

Sure. So I would say our strategy has been focused on measurable outcomes since day one. As I mentioned, we wouldn't get money if we weren't able to prove that it was working. But we also think about media in a full funnel context. So awareness drives consideration, drives acquisition, and they're all tied to a person and that person is interacting with multiple messages every day. So I think in the past, and what we're trying to progress away from is the campaign specific mindset. Every product works in a silo, they're all targeting a general audience. And once a product launches on awareness channels, we're no longer on awareness channels. So we've spent a lot of time proving that interaction effect between awareness and consideration acquisition so that we can say what's happening up here is benefiting up here, but we also know the unique benefit of what's happening at the top.

(12:44):

But I think the two biggest things holding CTV back at the moment for us, I can't speak for the rest of the advertising industry, and it seems like they're spending a lot, is price and brand safety. So on the price front on average CTV ads among publishers, I will not name are two to three times higher than broad reach cable or some mix that's more efficient in nature. Brand safety is another in that you can buy an unlimited amount of CTV that's running in a lot of different fragmented places who you choose to buy it direct. You can choose to buy it through a hardware provider or you can choose to buy it in some app aggregator and all of those will air to some household in some content somewhere. And you know what the household is. So where we've been pushing a lot on brand safety is can we get, it doesn't have to be similar to TV per se, but we definitely need to know what programming we're running against.

(13:38):

Especially if we're talking about long tail connected TV programming. Most of it's not brand safe, but there's a lot of connected TV content that's tied to children's programming. And if it's going to a household and we can't exactly confirm where that ad brand, who knows, we're running against 12 year olds this entire time. So we're pushing for more information back through brand safety vendors and publishers to validate exactly where that's running in the same context or in a similar context to TV logs. I think once that happens, we invest in the same way that we would anywhere else.

Ilyse (14:16):

Do you think it'll get there sooner rather than later?

David (14:19):

Or is the data incoming?

David (14:22):

I think so. Brand safety technology really just as a matter of getting the information from the hardware or the app provider itself.

Damian (14:32):

As we look back 2024, we wrote a lot about how the upfronts were changing and there's been a lot of press about upfronts changing. What's your perspective on the upfronts? You talked a little bit about the differences between linear and CTV. Has that impacted the way you think about your products across linear and streaming? How has the upfronts changed things, speeded things up, slowed things down.

David (14:55):

So the upfronts are always, I don't know if I'm, was it masochist or sadist, but the upfronts are usually my favorite part of the year because you can get a lot of decisions done at the same time and you can look much longer term than sometimes even my agency days clients or in our cases the business are thinking themselves. So it forces a lot of conversations on what is the outlook of the business, what is the outlook of the products you're prioritizing? And then on the other side, how have macro changes impacted what we think will work and at what price? So I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the last four years more has changed in consumption patterns than the previous 10 before that. I think it has had a pretty massive impact on the marketplace in that anyone who's watched cable TV recently will watch endless reruns on cable tv. And so it's really just a matter of capturing passive intent. There's not all that much original content that is being developed specifically for TV anymore.

(15:59):

So it's a bit more like, I don't know, run of network or video advertising 10 years ago. So we have to take those two things and counterbalance if we know that the bulk of live TV is happening with hyper consumers who are watching it a lot and have a different footprint than those who are watching streaming. But we also know that streaming, ad supported streaming is a very small portion of the total streaming universe. How do we munge those two things together to find the right opportunity? And how do we validate that change is ultimately resulting in a response among the people that are most likely to respond for a particular product or service advertising. This year we undertook a big evaluation. Essentially it felt like the inflection point to say, we can't really just go to market in the same way that we always have in the upfront because there's not as much inventory as we want to buy in the upfront, but it's a good opportunity for us to think about what is a holistic video investment long-term and do we make drastic changes this year or do we make drastic next year?

(16:58):

So we essentially undertook a process where we built versions of that strategic segmentation that I mentioned where all of our products are aligned against, and then flip that same segmentation around to understand how networks and digital video packages and connected TV packages all reach these different segments. And some of that's a slew of tools, not any one tool has that whole picture. So we use different platforms for different parts of the picture and then started to reorient the entire investment around how do we best reach the people that are most relevant to this product in a way that sort of normalizes the whole investment for the firm.

Ilyse (17:43):

So this was the first year that you actually looked at all the puzzle pieces, I guess, and put those together. Was there something that inspired that in the market specifically or just the ongoing change throughout the past couple of years?

David (18:00):

Yeah, I think that what really prompted that change was the options that we have to procure media in different ways. And so now we have different options to say, what is the best method of buying? Is this something that we need to buy as a commodity at the best price? Is this something that we need to buy that's highly targeted to a household, but we need to control the programming? Is this something that we within a reasonable bounds know what the content categories are and we think that there's opportunity in the response of people watching in these content categories in connected tv, or is there on the opposite side a commodity for video where we say if everything's going to run in this standard topic allow list and we're trying to get tonnage but control for the way an ad is served. And that flexibility didn't exist to the extent that it exists now, I think our flexibility to choose those different routes is also relatively recent development through our in housing efforts. And also we have great very flexible agency partnerships to say, we're going to look at this together. We'll figure out the best combination of entities or methods or pipelines to get access to the inventory that we want at the right price. And sometimes that is a collaboration and sometimes it's something we do ourselves. So that flexibility gave us a lot more options to think critically about where and how we secure video upfront inventory.

Ilyse (19:27):

Traditionally, banks are perceived as brick and mortar establishments, but these days they're all online and digital. How does that change the way you go to market?

David (19:39):

Right. So each business has some blend of digital and branch originated business. So we think about business bank. If you're a small business owner, you're more likely than not going to go into a branch to make sure you know who the person is that's handling your money for your business. Whereas credit cards are much more digital first. So that blend of who opens, which accounts, where is usually a pretty good predictor of what channels will work well to solicit a response. We have a very big app and website. We're also one of the most conservative cybersecurity companies on earth. So there's a lot of capabilities that marketers like that we will never have or capabilities that we have to work a lot harder to evaluate whether or not it's worth it for us. We treat that as a good challenge.

(20:35):

If you can't explain exactly where information is going and why it's being used, you probably shouldn't use it in the first place. I don't think that's unique to finance. So we are able use that to our advantage too. So if we're not a first mover and everyone is working out the kinks on our behalf and then we say, okay, we're comfortable with this because we're seeing how the landscape is utilizing this new tool or this new technology or some other part of the technology ecosystem makes it so that we don't have to use it in the way that it is built to be used, but we can customize it and this company will work with us. That helps us to be effective when we need to be effective. And we also don't need to be a first mover because a very small change in improvement for us might be the revenue of an entire company in another place.

(21:25):

So it's worth it to be methodical and very focused on getting it right, getting things secure, using our digital capabilities in a responsible way. But then I think that the most important thing for us is that our branches, we view our branches as a superpower. It's a place where the vast majority of our customers form an opinion of us. If you go into a branch and don't have a good experience, then you also won't have a good opinion of us. And the marketing effectiveness is partially on what ads you put into market. It's partially based on the impression people have of you, and it's partially based on the opinion that people state of you based on their experience. And so we are always looking for ways to learn from what is working in the branches to improve our marketing capabilities. So I don't think that there's necessarily a trade off. It's trying to find the way that they both benefit each other and then what mix of channels ultimately encourages the type of interest that will grow the business in the unique way the business is configured.

Damian (22:23):

Great. Thank you so much for these really thoughtful insights.

Ilyse (22:26):

Yes, thank you so much.

Damian (22:33):

And that's it for this edition of The Current Podcast. We'll be back next week. So stay tuned.

Ilyse (22:38):

The Current Podcast theme is by Love and Caliber. The Current team includes Kat Vesce and Sydney Cairns.

David (22:44):

And remember, we treat our media strategy a lot more like financial planning and analysis. We need to be very disciplined in the way that we spend it and use the best information we have to make sure it'll be a success.

Damian (22:54):

I’m Damian.

Ilyse (22:55):

And I'm Ilyse.

Damian (22:56):

And we'll see you next time. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave as a review. Also tune into our other podcast, The Current Report.