About
Ally has developed a tech-forward marketing campaign framework to drive engaging, positive, and informative financial well-being experiences.
Innovation presentation
Staying true to our mission of being relentless ally that helps you on your financial journey, we leverage external marketing to build trust with existing and prospective customers – often offering tools and information to further empower the customer. The overall goals of our marketing campaigns are:
• Drive visibility of brand
• Build product awareness and consideration
• Increase likeability through disruptive moments built from relevant insights
The traditional approach was to leverage one or more 3rd party vendors to develop the campaigns, but the team identified several challenges that were resulting in less frequent and impactful campaigns. Specifically,
• It was proving out to be expensive and time intensive to work with multiple vendors and align on projects.
• Siloed development required constant project management.
• The time to market varied from vendor to vendor.
• No consistency in development approach and no reusability.
• Campaign execution became complex when a 4th party was also involved for development.
To help solve the challenge, the Marketing group engaged the Ally Tech Labs team – our in-house tech research, development, and rapid prototyping group. The Tech Labs team was engaged to develop the campaigns with the goal of reducing the dependency on external vendors while improving the time to market.
It was time to rethink the approach and to do so, we focused on five key pillars –
• High Velocity Team: Focused on developing a lean, multifaceted team with expertise across various tech domains that could quickly adapt to unique tech requirements.
• Rapid Agile Development: Daily design, problem solving sessions with tech and creative teams; pair programming, test driven development.
• Engineering Mindset: Developed a culture where teams can focus on initiating design based on abstract concept while requirements are getting formed, adeptness at designing under constraints & understanding the trade-offs with various approaches.
• Leveraging Ally Assets: Set-up reusable platform for development, testing and deployment, automated testing and deployment, leveraged proven in-house security tools for testing
• Platform Approach : Accelerated agility, flexibility and efficiency by focusing on designing and developing modular architecture. Developed base framework with tooling and CI/CD pipeline for instant development. Developed reusable UI components to cater to future needs.
Based on this approach we were able to successfully develop and deploy major campaigns, including:
Financial Vows – Provides Mad Libs experience for customers and prospects to generate financial vows in a fun way and share it on social channels instantly. We also highlight financial education resources for couples planning to get married. The project was designed, developed, and deployed in 21 days
Your Story – Customer testimonial audio capture allowed customers record their experience about Ally, in their own voice and share in a frictionless way. Audio transcripts and sentiment analysis are performed in order to highlight high value recordings. We were able to implement this capability in 4 weeks
HeroicALLY – Highlighting Ally’s partnership with DC Comics in the Milestone Initiative, this page brings awareness to diverse heroes in the Milestone universe as well as shows biographies of participants in The Milestone Initiative Talent Development Class.
Ally Lending – A secure page for Lending Associates to dynamically review & acknowledge completion of training courses. It ensures that our associates are upto date on the information and ready to serve our customers with most accurate information.
Cash Bonus – Unique experience for customers (implemented via gamification) that talks about financial literacy and provides information about short-term interest boost program for new and existing customers.
Ally Racer - Fun racing game for customers and prospects on iOS or on a website. Unique way to capture prospects interest while they have a fun race with Alex Bowman (Ally sponsored racer)
The platform was battle-tested with these successful campaign developments. Each campaign listed above had different user experiences and varied in tech stack. The time to market has significantly improved. The campaigns are developed and deployed in days instead of months. The framework caters to web/mobile development. We are extending it to develop capabilities using blockchain/AR/VR technologies as well.
We can develop capabilities with rich user experiences; Adhere to stringent timelines; Ensure campaigns are secure and protected because of the platform we built.
Uniqueness of the project
The development of capabilities at the platform level helped us to develop unique campaigns in record time.
Overall Platform Capabilities
• Composable UI elements: Framework that incorporates new user experiences easily
• Precompiled static content for performance: Loads contents faster especially for gaming/AR/VR experiences
• Extensible API framework: pre-wired microservices for integration with 3rd party or internal applications
• Automated testing and deployment: Pipeline ready for quick and thorough testing and production deployment
• Predefined cloud deployment templates with security baselines: Allows us to leverage tried and tested templates for faster deployments
Financial Vows Campaign Technical Highlights
• Mad libs guided wizard user experience: Fun way for customers/prospects to generate vows
• Saving Vows: Unique urls are generated for each vow and stored thus allowing users to look at older vows they created
• Social media integration: Ability to seamlessly post the vows on social channels
• Malicious word suppression: ML utility that identifies malicious user inputs and prompts to correct
• Novel image upload authentication: mechanism leveraging optical character recognition & pixel based steganography
Your Story Campaign Technical Highlights
• Native audio capture without plugins / extensions: provides frictionless user experience.
• Integration with WebRTC: leverage open-source capability to develop the feature.
• Secure large file upload: API pattern developed to securely store large audio files.
• Sentiment Analysis: Evaluate the sentiment of recorded voice memo and notify the customer service teams to quickly resolve issues (negative sentiment voice memos) and thus keep customer satisfaction level up.
HeroicALLY Campaign Highlights
• Embedded streaming video content with unique user experience
The technical implementation for each campaign differs, but we were able to develop new capabilities quickly since each campaign leverages the same base framework that was developed as part of the Ally Marketing Campaign Disruptor Platform.
