How Golden 1 Pursues Market Share with ‘Always On’ Marketing
Growth in the competitive California market has pushed CMO Michael Daum to stress martech tools and careful but effective use of GenAI.
By Steve Cocheo, Senior Executive Editor at The Financial Brand
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When Golden 1 Credit Union’s Michael Daum speaks of the role of generative artificial intelligence, he doesn’t talk about saving staff or turning creative tasks over to software. Instead, he sees value in speed and, frankly, in avoiding the tedium of the early creative process.
Here’s what Daum, SVP and chief marketing officer at the $20 billion-assets credit union, means:
When developing a major campaign to bring to market, the usual first step is brainstorming with the credit union’s agency of record. Once there’s a kernel of an idea, the hard work begins.
"In the old way," explains Daum, "the agency would give you two or three different examples of an approach. They’d pull some clip art or stock photos that maybe weren’t exactly what you were looking for. But they would be kind of what you were looking for. Then they’d join them to some copy."
Then the back and forth would begin. Move this, move that. Change this, change that. "And finally you land on something."
"It was a tedious process because a lot of it was based on whatever they could get their hands on," says Daum.
Now, he explains, Golden 1’s agency, Questus, begins with the credit union’s creative brief. "They’re using AI to generate images that are specifically in synch with that brief."
That’s not the end of the process, but it delivers concepts closer to what everyone has in mind.
Daum says this gets the campaign aligned "before you’ve burned the expense of a photographer for a custom shoot and slowed down your get-to-market time."
Then, the traditional approach kicks in, with artistic and copywriting talent and other human specialists "doing what they do best, which is taking the concept and interpreting it," says Daum. "In this way, what people see in the market still has a human touch and is genuine to your brand."
Indeed, Daum says nothing leaves his marketing shop that’s not had human involvement, and a touch of due diligence. He insists on controls and on ensuring that processes are documented.
"It’s not ‘no holds barred’ and no rules," says Daum, a veteran marketer who worked at KeyBank and then USAA for over a decade each before entering the credit union space. "You want to make sure what you’re putting out in the market is actually what you want to be putting out in the market."
The need for speed exists because Daum firmly believes in "always on" marketing — California-based Golden 1, #6 in size in the industry, never goes dark, always having messaging out there in a very competitive market. He sees any lapse as a lost opportunity.
While GenAI is a fresh development for Golden 1, Daum notes that the organization has been using AI in multiple other forms for some time. Yet there are areas where GenAI is not permitted, he says: member data, consumer data, indeed, anything that can impact brand safety.
"There will too much that’s unknown at this point," says Daum. "We’re not in a race to show off or to be ahead on something if we don’t feel comfortable with it, or if it’s not in keeping with what we’re trying to accomplish."
And that mission, what he’s trying to accomplish, is what brought Daum to Golden 1 about a year ago. In much of that time, he’s been working to upgrade and optimize the credit union’s arsenal of marketing technology, and how it’s used.
How Golden 1 Wants to Shine Even Brighter
Daum says that Golden 1 has about 1.1 million members at present in a market that has roughly 41 million people. The state’s market has a "barbell" financial institution sector.
"All of the major large depository institutions are here," says Daum, "and then you’ve got credit unions and local banks at the other end. You don’t have as much of regional bank presence in California as you see in other parts of the country."
To Daum, this means opportunity to build membership. Basically anyone who lives or works in the state can open an account with Golden 1. The credit union maintains a network of around 70 branches and home loan centers across the state.
"We feel like we’re well situated for growth because we not only have branch density, but we’re getting better with our digital capabilities, which is allowing us to reach people in remote areas or in parts of the state where we don’t have a physical network," says Daum.
Beyond digital, Daum has been placing more chips on more sophisticated approaches to long-time tools like direct mail.
"We’ve been getting further up the sales funnel and been tweaking the dials throughout the year to build out our marketing mix," says Daum.
Part of this has entailed partnering with more marketing technology vendors, and finding ways to reach out to prospects in the environs of the organization’s existing branches. "We’ve been seeing some nice lift," says Daum.
In the first public edition of a new J.D. Power report, the U.S. Credit Union Satisfaction Study, Golden 1 tied for eighth place at 728 points on a 1,000 point scale. (The top-ranked institution was SchoolsFirst Federal Credit Union, at 783. SchoolsFirst ranks #1 in size among credit unions based in California, with Golden 1 ranked #2. SchoolsFirst is the nation’s fourth-largest credit union.)
Read more: Credit Unions May Have Problems Brewing Among Millennials and Generation Z, Say J.D. Power
A Team that Allows Some Enterprise Within the Whole
Daum’s role encompasses external communications, community relations, events, sponsorships, public relations, government relations, marketing, advertising and martech. He has a team of 50 in-house, as well as a group of outside vendors.
He says this amalgamation of functions is helpful because every new thrust — including some branch expansion — can be coordinated. Daum believes this helps cement the way the public sees the institution.
"People don’t say, ‘Oh, that’s PR, oh, that’s a product’," he says. "They just look at it and think, ‘That’s Golden 1’."
That’s partly why he favors the "always on" approach: "Constantly shutting the car off and trying to start it up again and letting the engine warm again, that’s a very inefficient way to operate."
One of the payoffs of this has been the opportunity to make course corrections. Sometimes traffic comes in, but it doesn’t convert. "Is there something that you need to fix at some part of the funnel?" says Daum. Fixing things depends on leaning into data analysis, using those insights, and sometimes, he says, "using your gut when necessary."
As Golden 1 has been refining and optimizing its martech stack under Daum he has been implementing training in agility. Along with that, he has stressed to people in charge of different technologies that he wants them to explore the full capabilities of the martech in their area.
Take email, a function every financial institution today uses.
"I talk to our person who leads all of our email work, and I’ll tell them, ‘You’re the CEO of email. You’ve got carte blanche authority to really shape this in the way that you think is going to be most effective. You own that channel’."
Read more: AI Won’t Replace You, But Bank Marketers Who Master It Will
The changing nature of martech is changing the type of person that Daum looks to recruit into Golden 1’s marketing operation.
Let’s go back to AI: "There are more tools now to help suggest copy and to help out with writing," says Daum. "To work with that, you need somebody who is really good at editing. That may be a skillset that didn’t exist before."
Again, Daum emphasizes the need to balance speed to market with care. "If you’re trying to get copy out in a hurry, you’ve got to have somebody on board who’s really adept at editing that copy, getting it into your brand voice, and into a place where you feel comfortable with it. So, it’s got to touch a human."
Read more: When It Comes to AI, ‘Wait-and-See’ May Mean ‘Wait-and-Die’
