Why ‘Brand Awareness’ Budgets Are Losing Ground to Provable Return
By Caroline Hroncich, Contributor at The Financial Brand
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Brand budgets at banks and credit unions are getting audited, and awareness spending is already losing ground because of it.
Banks cut the share of their marketing budget going to brand awareness to 17% in 2026 from 20% in 2025, according to Cornerstone Advisors’ survey of 126 senior executives at U.S. banks and credit unions fielded in January and February. Fintel Connect, an affiliate marketing platform, commissioned the research.
The same survey found that 31% of executives think they’re giving credit to the wrong marketing channel. Another 26% don’t know whether they are. Not a single institution said it could reliably trace results back to marketing for every outcome the report tested.
Marketers are being asked to prove brand spending works, and brand is the hardest line to defend. The ones keeping their budgets have found ways to show it pays off.
Key insight: Proxy metrics for brand only work if they’ve been running long enough to show a trend. Start collecting them before anyone asks.
Need to Know:
- Banks trimmed brand awareness to 17% of the 2026 marketing budget from 20% a year earlier, per Cornerstone Advisors and Fintel Connect.
- Seven in 10 institutions told Cornerstone they move marketing money between objectives mid-year, most often at an executive’s request.
- AI referral traffic is 0.16% of banking website visits, the lowest in financial services, though AI Overviews appear on 26.2% of banking queries, per Conductor.
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Brand Is the First Line Under Review
Overall budgets are healthy. Credit unions between $500 million and $4.9 billion in assets raised marketing spend 9.1% in 2025, and the largest institutions did the same, per Capital Performance Group’s analysis of NCUA call report data.
Acquisition math explains some of the urgency. A new checking account costs more than $200 to acquire before any incentive, according to ProSight Financial Association, and 43% of institutions offered a cash incentive in 2025, averaging $277.
“There’s a lot of different ways you reach customers in banking,” says Mike Moss, managing director for financial institutions at Affinity Solutions, which builds purchase-data offer programs for banks and credit unions. Email campaigns and online advertising reach the same person, and pulling those into a single view of that customer is where it breaks down. “Banks weren’t set up for that,” he says.
What’s changed: The budget conversation no longer waits for planning season. Seven in 10 institutions told Cornerstone they shift money between objectives during the year, and 53% named executive requests and competitive moves as the trigger.
- Know which of your channels can produce a result on demand, and which need lead time.
- Get the fully loaded acquisition cost in front of the executive asking the questions, incentive included.
- Report brand and product results separately so a weak quarter in one doesn’t sink the other.
Every Campaign Gets a Scorecard
Michigan State University (MSU) Federal Credit Union sets its benchmarks campaign by campaign, before anything goes to market.
That’s a change from how the work used to be judged. “Originally everyone looked at impressions and clicks from a digital media standpoint,” says Maria Presocki, vice president of marketing at the East Lansing, Michigan-based credit union, which has $8.26 billion in assets and nearly 400,000 members. “Everyone just wanted to see how many eyeballs they could get on their message.”
The fall student welcome campaign is judged on checking accounts opened, conversion rate and campus engagement. A certificate campaign is judged on deposit dollars and on what else those members opened afterward. Presocki sets response and click-through targets for each channel too, and those move depending on what the campaign is for.
Moss runs the same discipline for the banks and credit unions he works with. “You can only measure what you define,” he says. His teams name the outcome first, then find the customers who fit it, split them into test and control, and track spending for roughly a year. The control group answers what would have happened without the campaign. His teams also count lift among customers who saw the offer and never activated it, alongside those who did.
Key insight: Pick the business outcome, then work backward to the channel metric. A certificate campaign measured only on deposit dollars misses the checking accounts it opened.
- Write the target metric and the threshold into the brief before creative starts.
- Use response and click-through rates as the floor, and product outcomes as the actual test.
- Define the second-order outcome. A certificate campaign that also opens checking accounts is worth more than the deposit total shows.
Commit to the Brand Line Before You Measure It
MSUFCU puts about two-thirds of its marketing behind product campaigns and the rest behind brand. The brand side gets measured on proxies: brand recall, participant and engagement counts at sponsored events, member retention, and branch traffic in markets where the credit union shows up in person.
MSUFCU has been presenting sponsor of the Detroit Free Press Marathon for four straight years, with the 2026 race set for Oct. 16-18. “The longer you invest in a partnership, the longer that continues to grow and grow,” says Presocki.
Moss wants the brand line protected before the measurement conversation starts. “It’s a foundational layer that you have to do,” he says. Banks carve out a share for it, then run attribution on everything else. “It’s hard to measure qualitative impact on a dollar basis,” he says.
Another insight: Brand pays off on a longer clock than the budget cycle it gets argued in. The institutions holding the line commit for a term and measure against a trend.
- Carve the brand share out before attribution starts and run measurement on what’s left.
- Commission brand recall research on a fixed schedule so you have a trend line rather than one reading.
- Count what a sponsorship produced: participants reached, engagements at the event, branch traffic in that market.
AEO Is the Next Budget Line You’ll Have to Defend
Presocki is putting money into answer engine optimization, working with MSUFCU’s digital experience team and outside vendors so the credit union surfaces when someone asks an AI assistant for certain terms, like the best student credit card.
The numbers institutions must work with here are early. AI referral traffic accounts for 0.16% of website visits in the banking subindustry, the lowest in financial services, and referral traffic across the sector slipped between May and September 2025, according to Conductor, an AEO software firm that analyzed 13,770 domains for its 2026 benchmarks. That’s a snapshot of a moving target. As more members open an AI assistant before a browser, the queries behind those visits change and the number moves with them.
Visibility is further along. AI overviews appeared on 26.2% of banking queries Conductor analyzed last fall, and Navy Federal Credit Union was one of five domains winning the most share of voice in those results, alongside Chase, Bank of America, Intuit and U.S. Bank.
Where AI does help the proof problem is targeting. MSUFCU uses next-best-product modeling to decide who gets which offer, and Presocki says it outperforms the team’s own guesses about which indicators matter.
- Track AI Overview presence and citation share for now, since referral traffic is too thin in banking to judge the work by.
- Run your top member acquisition queries through ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews this quarter, so there’s a baseline to compare against later.
- Validate next-best-product model output against a group selected the old way before handing it the whole file.
Bottom line: The audit won’t stop at brand awareness. AEO is next, and marketers who start tracking it now will have something to show when they’re asked.
Presocki keeps the frame wider than any single campaign. “Overall, evaluating your ROI is really about how your credit union is performing at the core,” she says.
