Owned Media Is Now Mission-Critical for Financial Marketers
Owned channels offer obvious advantages over "rented" third-party platforms – consistency of message and experience, even better ROI. But an effective owned media strategy also requires focused investment and attention to data, technology and identity management.
By Beth Merle, Vice President, Enterprise Customer Experience for Data Axle
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64% of brands plan to scale their owned-media investments this year, according to the 2025 Sonders Owned Media Marketing Report, The reasons are clear: higher engagement, better use and control of all customer data, and higher reliance on brand-controlled channels.
Owned media is a brand’s most valuable asset as the audience has already provided consent, giving brands a means to encourage loyalty and advocacy with the customer. A highly effective owned-media strategy can also transform into new revenue streams. Institutions like Chase have already moved in this direction. Through its new in-house media network, Chase Media Solutions, the company is unlocking new value from its owned digital properties by delivering its 80 million consumers personalized offers from brands they love. It’s not just about media sales — it’s about turning owned channels into powerful engines for growth, loyalty and added revenue.
Advertising costs from the major digital platforms continue to rise. Banks have been experiencing even greater bidding costs due to competing for the same audience and ad space. A budget shift is clear: banks and credit unions need to double down on owned-media strategies — not only for cost efficiency, but for greater control, personalization and long-term value.
Read more:
- Will Banks and Fintechs Become Retail Media Networks?
- Rise of ‘Commerce Media’ in Banking Offers Revenue… and Challenges
The New Imperative: Controlling the Customer Journey
Further investment in owned media—such as websites, apps, email, in-branch screens, contact centers, ATM, and knowledge bases — is a wise investment, offers financial institutions a more reliable path forward. These channels allow for precise, compliant, and context-rich messaging, powered by first-party data already collected through trusted customer relationships.
Controlling the customer journey begins with understanding the various channels a customer can interact with your organization. Taking a concerted effort to map out each of those interactions — to include both good and bad experiences — is imperative to making every connection relevant to the customer. Do not underestimate the value of every customer touchpoint that you have control over. Rather, build out the very best engagement while being able to pivot messaging in near real-time should you need to overcome customer concern.
Four Pillars of a High-Performance Owned Media Strategy
To compete effectively in today’s environment, financial institutions must shift from transactional marketing to a unified, data-led engagement strategy.
Here’s what that requires:
1. Customer Centricity
At its core, a customer-centric approach puts the customer at the center of the bank’s marketing strategy. Although many would agree this is the best approach to create long-term customer engagement and advocacy, this approach can be difficult for many financial institutions, due to siloed products and systems where disparate data provides a disjointed customer experience. To thrive, brands would be wise to back away from being a product/service-driven organization, demonstrating customer value throughout the entire customer journey beginning with acquisition.
Engaging with customers based on their individual behaviors, desires and needs requires a coordinated convergence of sales, customer service and marketing data sources. This enables a true 360-degree view of each customer and household, using a combination of online and offline data points across every channel, including zero-to-third party data. Leveraging the analytics gained from this customer data drives relevancy and creates value.
The bar is high, and customers want to feel special, unique and have a seamless interaction with their financial institution as they receive from their favorite customer centric brands — like Amazon, Apple, and Hilton. These companies are known for delivering individualized customer messaging at each stage of the customer journey by leveraging vital data insights.
2. Trusted Data as a Strategic Asset
First-party data is more than a compliance checkbox — it’s a competitive advantage as it’s collected with consent, inherently more accurate, and uniquely reflective of your actual customers. When unified with other collected data across digital and offline channels, it enables tailored communications that build trust and deepen engagement.
Choosing the right data influences the impact of your customer-centric strategy. Data sourced from customer interaction points (online, mobile, ATM) and across customer-facing interactions such as branch, marketing, call center, and chat, etc. should be collected. For creating a 360-customer view that delivers coherent customer engagement, disparate data sources must be stitched together accessible in one environment to be the source of truth and effectively actioned upon. Relevant communication is fueled by having a strong set of trusted zero-to third-party data, seamlessly pulling the right data elements, at the right time through the right channel.
A data-driven approach enables a brand to interact with the customer with low latency data signals. This shared data provides consistent messaging between and across channels. For example, a customer may have had an account issue today, yet they are part of the audience for a new product campaign. You would have the ability to not only suppress this customer from a marketing campaign but change the messaging to thank them for sharing their concerns with a customer service representative. This transforms a data-driven approach to a unified data-driven experience, where technology is the enabler for coordinated and relevant customer interactions.
3. Outcome-Focused Technology Investment
Legacy martech stacks often include multiple solutions and lack agility. Success in owned media depends on whether your systems allow real-time decisioning, content delivery, and customer segmentation. An agile approach can be challenging; however, it is necessary to drive a connected customer-centric experience.
Brands need to ask themselves:
- How quickly can data be leveraged that meets desired business outcomes and customer interaction objectives?
- Do the tools and technology in place work well for business outcomes based on the company vision?
- Where does the data reside today to inform the best customer interactions?
- Is data quickly accessible and accurate across sales, service, marketing, inventory, ecommerce and the other necessary teams for an individualized data-driven strategy?
The technology, tools and platforms must achieve the relevant business outcomes of your brand, exceed customer expectations and deliver upon the KPIs. A brand owned-media ecosystem puts financial institutions in full control of tech stacks, analytics, strategy, digital content, creative, messaging, online, mobile and activation. Many brands struggle to effectively bring disparate data together at the individual and household level with the highest level of integrity. The key is building an identity framework that is technology agnostic and can accurately bring data sources together across a variety of systems.
4. Identity Resolution for Seamless Engagement
As financial institutions have found themselves with a multitude of operational systems, martech stacks and adtech providers, they are realizing these solutions do not speak to each other. Most organizations have dozens of customer profiles that require reconciliation due to a variety of IDs to the individual and household level. A game changer for solving this problem is creating a brand-owned identity spine for driving one’s owned-media approach. By stitching together disparate IDs from adtech and martech, one can create a unified, holistic view of the individual to effectively personalize customer interactions.
This framework would also act as a central repository of customer information allowing brands to seamlessly integrate data from digital and name-based sources to serve as the backbone of an enhanced owned-media ecosystem. Once this critical component is complete, financial brands have future-proofed their data and can successfully adapt to developing best-in-class AI-driven marketing strategies.
Why Owned Media Is a Smart Investment Now
With customer acquisition costs rising and margins under pressure, owned media delivers stronger ROI. But more importantly, it puts financial brands in control of their own narratives and relationships.
Instead of relying on rented channels and third-party platforms, owned media enables:
- Direct, permission-based communication
- Better personalization and segmentation
- Cost savings from reduced paid media spend
- Greater agility in responding to customer needs
In 2025, owned media isn’t just an option — it’s a strategic necessity. For financial marketers, it offers a scalable, compliant, and highly effective way to build deeper relationships, increase retention, and future-proof customer engagement.
As trust becomes the currency of modern finance, the ability to deliver consistent, personalized experiences through owned channels will define the next epoch of growth.
