Episode 15: How to Think On Your Feet and React In Real Time as a Community Banker

Well, greetings everybody. Welcome to the 15th episode of the Banker Education Series. Today is Thursday, July 21st, 2016, and this is Eric Cook with WSI Digital Marketing. I am very excited to have you here with us today, and we're going to talk a little bit about this little Pokémon creature that's taking over the internet and causing the valuation of Nintendo to skyrocket. Among other things, and how when an organization like a community bank is able to react in real time and think on their feet and be nimble and quick, they can take advantage of this. And there certainly are challenges related to a bank and being conservative and sometimes don't react as quickly as we need to. And so we've got a couple of experts that are going to talk about how they've done it. Some things to think about and certainly interested in getting feedback. I've hopped over here just real quickly to my Banker Education Series page because this did get promoted quite a bit on social media, and some of you that may not be on my email reminder list, if you are in the banking space or interested in future webinars, you can visit us at poweredbywsi.com/bankereducationseries or just type in BES and and that will go ahead and get you here. There's a link at the top paragraph where you can sign up for email reminders, and those will provide you with an update on future shows. And then while you're here, if you're interested, there are some other webinars that you might want to check out that are particularly related to the banking industry. One I want to draw attention to is episode number 12, which had somebody else from Citizens Bank of Edmond, Joe Castillo, who is the CEO over there. We're Proud to have Ann Chen, their Senior Director of Marketing, with us today. But that was a really great webinar that talked about a couple of CEOs' perspectives on engaging in social media. So it's no surprise that Ann is back as the guest for how an organization really should think on their toes and interact and engage. And this Pokémon craze certainly is one that has kind of taken the internet by storm. And then also excited to have Ben Pankinen from Social Assurance. Anne and Ben and I actually hung out a little bit at the ICBA conference in New Orleans, so this is a virtual reunion for us, although we're not hanging out having lunch, but it is good to hang out with the two of you, even if it's from a virtual perspective. And I'm hoping that I get to learn a thing or two today. So As we go through today's session, I just want to remind everybody that it is recorded and it will be made available back at the BES page. So you can stop back and check that out. And if you are attending the session live and have a question or a comment, by all means, please feel free to use the chat function and let us know. Love to hear what you think, and if you've got something of clarification, We're hoping that we're going to allow for some time for some Q&A, and then I know Anne does have a hard stop right at the top of the hour, but Ben and I will stick around and we'll do our best. And I by no means am professing to be an expert in the world of Pokémon, but it sounds like Ben's got to stop right there in his office.

Yes.

And we had some pretty interesting conversation before we actually launched the webinar. I think today is going to be a really great show. So with that out of the way and my introductions formally complete, we've got the webinar showing here. And, uh, Anne and Ben, welcome to my Banker Education Series webinar. And, uh, I mentioned in the, in the pre-show, you two now hold the distinction for the most registrants of any of my BES webinars so far. So I have a feeling the whole Pokémon craze helped, but I'm sure you guys had quite a bit of lure because you're both very socially active out there on the internet and helped to promote it. And so we've got a big audience today. I'm really excited.

Glad to be here. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks, Eric.

So to kind of kick things off, and I don't want this show to really be totally about Pokémon because the whole concept Is really thinking real time and being able to react. And so we've got a few introductory slides, and I think Ben's going to take a majority of this conversation. And they just talk about, you know, some of the challenges and just thinking about kind of the big picture, but we're certainly going to use Pokémon GO as the, I guess, the case study at hand, but This could have very well been Foursquare. As I was doing a webinar earlier this week, I was thinking, well, you know, other than Pokémon, which has caused people to get out and about and travel to places and be physically present, the last time I'd seen something like this impact businesses was really when Foursquare came around and encouraged people to go to physical locations to check in. You could earn badges and little stars, and you could even get the mayorship in some Starbucks. Shops were giving mayors free coffee. And so the concept of being out and about and being physically present and checking in is certainly not new, but the gamification of it and how, you know, Pokémon Go has taken it to the next level and gotten so many more people involved, I think, is the next role in this. And I don't know as if there were a lot of banks that really jumped on the whole Foursquare, but certainly we've been seeing a lot in the news about some institutions like Citizens and others that have embraced this. So with maybe a little bit of that background, kind of to set the stage, Ben, why don't you kind of share some of your thoughts here and we'll continue on and I'll be quiet and let you guys actually do some talking.

Sounds great. Well, hey, thanks for the segue, Eric. I think it does a great job of providing a backdrop to really the conversation that's to be had here, and it is that You know, as bankers we can move faster, and there are advantages to those who do move faster. We've used this phrase for years that customers are not virtual, and really when you come into the boardroom and say, hey, we're trying to do a new marketing tactic, one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that, you know, when someone walks in your door, they walk up to the front of your door, even if they're there looking for a Pokémon lure that's lured some Pokémons to your area, Really, what you're looking for is new customers, and we want to see that even though you may be marketing in digital areas, that the traditional sort of concepts still apply. And that is that, you know, when we're comparing different platforms, whether that be Pokémon versus what you're doing on Facebook versus, you know, what you were traditionally doing in the newspaper, all of the same principles apply. And one of those is that You know, we want to measure. You know, we talk about things like impressions. We've worked with them some, and to hear how they do that, I think it's really fascinating to talk about what happens, you know, when they get free marketing essentially on social media and can attribute value to that. I think that's really important. It's important when you sort of get a story in the newspaper that you didn't have to pay for. I think that's a really, really interesting way to describe that and look at it. that some of the times you're not paying for it, like is the case with free social media, but sometimes, you know, maybe you're dropping $1.20, right, for a lure, or, you know, you're paying people who are walking around playing Pokémon at an event or things like that. You know, we still want to evaluate it. We want to see, are we getting real impressions? And the low, low cost that were investing in a platform like Pokémon during the first couple weeks. You can invest so little dollar effort and a little bit of time to understand it that it seems to far outpace what you might get in more traditional platforms, just because the people are there. So I think, you know, for that slide, really it's just describing as you're a bank evaluating what happens You know, you want to look at it and say, how many of these impressions make it worth it? And you're not going to know on day one. The reality is you don't know. But what you do know is that if you're early and you're moving quickly, you can gain some advantage over potentially institutions that are much, much larger that can't move as quickly. So next slide, Eric. So, you know, I think one of the other questions that we can kind of at least throw out, you know, right away is, you know, sometimes we hear the objection in the boardroom of, is Pokémon as a platform, is this a long-term marketing platform for us? Are we going to be spending money years down the road on advertising on Pokémon? The short answer I have is no. Now, I don't think that's totally fair either. You might still be utilizing Pokémon or, you know, some other platforms down the road, but it's not so much about those, you know, individual short-term steps like this. It's more about embracing that the entire web can be like this. So, you know, the question is, is this a long-term opportunity to advertise on Pokémon as a long-term strategy? My answer is no, but the short-term strategy of gaining followers and gaining attention and making things move can evolve into a long-term strategy if you're doing this and paying attention to things quickly.

Right.

So if you can allocate a very small budget in a short amount of time, then it can be a long-term strategy of staying on top of engaging opportunities for digital marketing. And so, I think moving first and moving fast when opportunities like this are introduced, setting aside some small amounts of budget so that you don't have as much red tape in place for your marketing team to be able to execute on these, I think are very important. I'm, you know, out of even our own customers and connections, You know, it's amazing how many times you have something that might be a $50 expenditure that gets in the way of moving fast in something like that. And so I think it's important to create a budget and say, we would like to— maybe in next year's budget, you have to get it in there, maybe it's next month's budget, but you say, hey, we'd like to preserve some amount of opportunity for executing on platforms like this, because we know there are going to be short-term opportunities and we want to move really quickly on those and not have to jump through that red tape. I think that's an important area to take a look at as well.

Ann, I don't know if you've got anything to add to that. I do have a comment, but I'll let you maybe comment if you like.

I was going to patiently wait for my slides here, but actually I have a very similar takeaway in one of my slides, but just as an actual case study. Please continue.

Well, the thing that I have observed and what's interesting, and I guess maybe an opportunity from a marketing perspective when it comes to digital, is this experimentation doesn't cost a lot. You know, boosting a post on Facebook or sponsoring an ad or just doing little things that are maybe $10 or $15 here and there. You made a good point, Ben, about you know, set aside maybe a little reserve fund with, you know, R&D as its focus, where you buy a lure, you play around with a Facebook ad, you sponsor a post, or you boost something, or, you know, to be able to experiment. And then in the world of digital, you have the ability to see what happens as a result of that pretty quickly, as opposed to in the old-school marketing Things were more expensive, they were more permanent. This is much more of a fluid, instantaneous, in-the-moment world that we live in, and being comfortable with that and having a system in place to allow you to do that I think is really important.

Yeah, completely agree. I think overall it's also important to take a look at digital marketing and say, as we sort of illustrated before, the same principles and rules apply in the digital space that apply in the physical area. So when we're driving down the interstate and we see individual billboards, we know that I could advertise on that billboard, maybe it costs me $1,000 a month, maybe it costs me $200 a month, depends on your location, right? So if we're out in the open in the middle of South Dakota, we know that the advertising space on billboards is very low. Also, if you've driven through South Dakota, they don't have sign ordinances, so you see billboard after billboard, but if you're looking at that that type of area, there's a lot of inventory of billboards, and so your price per billboard goes down. Now, what's interesting to understand in the digital space is the same principle applies in that when Google first started, you had a very low cost per click because advertisers were not demanding pay-per-click advertising yet. There also wasn't quite as much traffic yet on Google as there is today, so what you found was, you know, maybe for 5 cents per click, you were getting pretty good traffic even on bank-type terms. And since banks are typically slower to adopt platforms like this, there were a number of financial institutions, usually non-traditional financial institutions, that were taking advantage in the early Google pay-per-click days. Now we know that if we're paying for a search term on a term like mortgage, we're going to be competing against national players, we're going to be competing at a very high price point on that pay-per-click, but as we look at local markets, as we look at maybe people who have already visited your website, those return visitors or what we would call retargeting in the industry, that dramatically reduces my cost per click. So all of that to say, when we see a platform like Pokémon that has yet to really establish the impact of dropping a lure, what you end up having is a very low cost for something that they don't yet know what the demand is. Demand's growing, so it probably won't stay there. If a lure continues to bring you know, 20, 30, 40 people to your location, certainly Nintendo's not, you know, stupid in this space. They're going to raise that cost for that click. That's why I consider it a short-term opportunity, but you still have long-term, you know, opportunities as well. It just may either cost you more, you may have to adapt, it may be a different game, there may be different elements of the game that become relevant as people, you know, sort of bring those markets into your area. Maybe you can sponsor a gym, you know, maybe you can have Pokémon events at your location, things like that that start to be a lot more relevant. But I think it's really worthwhile to think of your pay-per-click world like this. So when we think of a platform like Facebook and the way you're buying pay-per-click, the value is they're driving a lot of traffic down that interstate of Facebook and they're seeing— you're seeing quite a few ads And people are clicking on those ads. We see quite a few good pay-per-click opportunities on social channels still today. But, you know, when you have a new platform or something massively change, it upsets this cart a little bit, and we have different available inventory. You know, we all of a sudden had an app in Pokémon that went from not existing to, in a week, it was now the number one performing app. So they had a whole bunch of inventory and not very many advertisers yet, but they had a lot of attention. So they had a lot of people driving down an interstate with not very many billboards yet. And so that's really your opportunity as an advertiser is to see those opportunities when they come open and say, you know what, this is where there's a lot of traffic. This is where I'm going to meet consumers. This is where they are, right? So I'd like to place that small opportunity. And that's where you can pick up the best bang for your buck, in those opportunities where there's a large amount of change happening. So hopefully that illustrates it in sort of maybe a different way than a lot of people probably describe pay-per-click.

Absolutely.

And, you know, Eric sort of outlined a few things at the beginning that I think are also really relevant to say, as we're looking at geolocation, sort of what's happened with Pokémon isn't a dramatically new change in technology. In fact, there's been a number of articles about how it was regressive in technology, which I think is the reason why a lot of things work. It's that you didn't have to go out and buy virtual reality goggles. If you've played with the virtual reality goggles and experienced world through that, it's revolutionary. It's really fascinating to see how the world can look through that, how you can interact physically with it. It's really fascinating. The mystique and success of Pokémon happened, I believe, in 2 areas. One, that it took existing technology and brought you something, a way to interact with the outside world that was unique. And they had a brand in Pokémon. For those of us who were in high school in either the '90s or 2000s, we're in that Pokémon era. So you have a large chunk of the population that's already exposed to Pokémon. The characters are the same. A lot of that branding still sticks with us, so we can understand what's happening here, and we can relate already with that Pokémon brand. So they had— they brought that brand into something that's already understood, and you didn't have to buy anything to start playing. So in the same way, these new platforms, as Eric mentioned, Foursquare was one that really kind of leapfrogged And they started doing reviews, and they're really trying to compete directly with Yelp. That's really Foursquare's biggest sort of play. But, you know, Facebook has a great mobile platform. Many of you have probably struggled with Facebook reviews already. You can review on a per-location basis, create new pages. That's a really important part to focus on, and I think it highlights, for those of you who are trying to gain consensus around your bank and say, hey, when I walk into a location, I'd like to see spend some time getting access to these locations, or I'd like to take the location data that we have and claim each of these locations on Facebook. I think those are worthwhile exercises. We have some tools available for that. Eric's got some, some great ideas on that, and I think those are, you know, great things to tackle because people are experiencing, even if they're not looking down on their phone like they are when they're playing Pokémon, they're at least experiencing the world in that way, and they are looking to platforms like Facebook and Google and I put the one on the bottom, Nextdoor. My neighborhood's very active on Nextdoor. I'm amazed at some of the things that they share, you know, whether it's someone coming down the street for a party or it's somebody saying, hey, I need to borrow this, or I'm looking for that, or there's something suspicious in our neighborhood. I think that's a great platform for banks to intersect into those neighborhoods and work with some of their employees and advocates in each of the neighborhoods that surround the bank because it really is a neighborhood-focused platform that's at least worthwhile to be exploring.

Cool, all very good, and I think certainly important to set the stage that, you know, we're gonna wrap the rest of the hour and chat about Pokémon and have some fun here, but thinking about the big picture of what got us to where we're at today, and maybe you need to have that kind of aha moment so that the next Pokémon Go that comes around. If you miss this one, that's okay, there's going to be more. But being able to be positioned to say, we don't want that to happen, we missed Foursquare, we missed Facebook advertising, we missed pay-per-click. Now maybe the light bulb goes off and we put some things in place so that the next time it comes around, we're not sitting on the sidelines. So all really, really good points. Thanks, Ben.

That was perfect. And you've been waiting patiently.

I can tell your fingers are— you probably hunted a few Pokémon while you're waiting, I'm sure. So you've added Maybe I did. If you did, you were kind and muted your phone so we didn't have to hear the music.

Exactly.

Yeah, so you have been written up in articles on a lot of different things, and certainly when Jill joined us, Heard on Heard's huge and kind of everything that you're doing. But American Banker, I read that this weekend and saw you referenced, and I was like, I so got to get her on the show and talk about this. So let's dive into it.

Yeah, no, definitely. And we with Citizens, this is kind of our general approach to most things. And as Ben said, it's not— as it's been shared already in the webinar so many times, it's not that, you know, oh, Pokémon Go and suddenly Citizens is jumping on board. Citizens is naturally kind of prepped and also ready to go in terms of these types of strategies. We're just very nimble in how we operate, especially in marketing, especially with an awesome CEO like Jill. So some of the strategies involved, I'll tell you from a case study perspective, is that we were first out the gate. That has a lot to do with senior management buy-in and also really almost support. It's not even just— it's past buy-in with Jill. It's almost kind of like, oh, we need to get on this. Oh, this is really, really exciting. And she's really brilliant at kind of sniffing out those trends right away. Also talk a little bit about visual branding as well as how it relates to our audiences. I mean, it's kind of lost on us if if we're doing all this work and our customers or our major stakeholders are kind of lost in it too. So, really just kind of seeing how we relate this to banking and also with the omnichannel experience, which is really, if you're not too familiar with that phrase, it basically kind of means the physical and digital seamlessly flowing together to a point of just creating this experience that you've come to expect from Citizens, whether it's digital or physical. And then also media strategy and how it's impacted even our annual event or our monthly event, Heard on Hershey. So with that, it all started with a tweet.

Can I hit the pause? Just for people that may not know how big of a bank you are, I think with all that you do, I often get people say, they've got to be huge. They've got to have a marketing department of like 6 people.

Oh, goodness.

Yeah, you're a small bank. You don't have a lot of offices. So give everybody some perspective of the size of the institution and what you're doing, because I think you're small but you're very powerful, and I think that's an important thing to mention here.

Good point. We are a $250 million— million with an M— community bank located in Edmond, Oklahoma, which is actually a suburb of the Oklahoma City metro area. Our marketing team is about 2 people. If you count Jill and some others, I mean, in terms of marketing, I kind of think of it as everybody at the bank is a marketer, but officially with the title is 2 people. And yeah, so we have a team of about 50-ish to 60-ish employees, and we have really only 1 location. So that's us in a nutshell. Good. That's helpful. But our social reach goes into the millions. We'll talk about that in a bit. So anyway, so this tweet kind of happened. I was actually out of town. I was actually at my best friend's wedding at home, and I saw this tweet from Jill. And, you know, this game was part of my childhood, so I kind of logged in, you know, played with my friends over the weekend while I was away. Didn't really think about the business implications or the banking implications right away. But once I saw this tweet, I knew that Jill was really onto something, and she was already on board, already on top of it before anyone else was, really. And that's really kind of the nature of senior management or a CEO that's just so on top of hot trends and seeing the— and more importantly, not even just knowing the trends, because I think most of us can kind of sense when something's a trend, but just almost kind of tying a banking implication to it or a business implication to it to kind of show that there is a business case for it. And she tied that directly right away even before— I think what happened was her son is 8 or about, well, middle school. He is in middle school. And he downloaded the game and they started to play it together. And she wasn't actually— she was a bystander watching him play it and she already could tell that it was going to be big. So from that we kind of moved on. Citizens is actually one of the rights Right outside our bank is actually PokéStop. So if you go on to the next slide, it shows you that we kind of— this is how it ties omnichannel experience. We had a physical PokéStop outside of our bank, but we kind of just pulled a couple things together. We already have branded water bottles, so that was really easy. We had an ice chest. I went out and got a Pikachu and some Pokémon balloons. And really, we kind of just set up our rest stop for trainers in our bank.

Awesome.

That's something that I think is highly easy to pull together, and it's very quick to kind of just say, you know what, let's just do it. This is a no-risk thing. I mean, our customers can easily take some water. It's not like we're going to close it off to only Pokémon Go people. And they're already walking around downtown. It's a trend that all of the businesses already saw really quickly when it first caught on. And As you can see on Facebook, we boosted it a little bit I would say. But other than that, really it's just more so like we put up a couple signs outside our bank that says, oh yeah, Pokémon Go players come by and get some free water in Citizens Bank at our Pokéstop. And that's really it. That's all the advertising that we got, and we reached more than 7,000 people. As you can see, there are like 24 retweets which never— I mean, on a typical tweet you may be lucky to get 1 or 2. So it really did kind of struck a chord. with customers and our followers. And moving on to the next slide, I think this is kind of the reaction that we got from just putting it out there for a week or so. It's really, our PokéStops were really only set up maybe a week or so. And you can kind of see that we kind of put up a little mini contest near our PokéStops, and we kind of said, hey, if you take a picture of a Pokémon you caught, or just Pokémon Go at Citizens Bank, how you're having fun with that, we'll give you like a $5 gift card to the local coffee shop. And the coffee shop is down the street from us, so we thought it would be kind of nice because people are already walking around. It's right now in Oklahoma more than 100 degrees outside. People are thirsty. They want to come in. They want to get a reprieve. Why not provide that opportunity at our bank? And you can kind of see all the different visuals that we have going on our campaign, and people driving around, going to the drive-through, hanging out in our lobby, and they're like, oh, look at that. There's a Pokémon there. Let me snap a picture. So I think that's the important part of campaigns like this is that social media is so highly digital these days that it's almost kind of like I always try to think of a visual tie if you're trying to catch on to a campaign, or especially something like Pokémon that's so visual. And something like this where you can use augmented reality, it's so amazing for branding. So that's That's this slide. And I think in the next slide there's a continuing engagement. Like, we have engagements on Instagram, on Facebook. People are checking in. And even some guys, you know, this tweet on the right actually happened before the campaign even started. So people are already kind of primed and ready to share about this kind of thing. It just kind of boosted an opportunity to give them more of an incentive to do it. And, you know, I kind of bantered back and forth with this guy. Eric, you can go to the next animation. And he was kind of like, oh, hope everything is all right. And then, you know, So I'm the voice behind Citizens Edmond, so naturally if you have someone who already knows how to play the game and kind of knows what's going on, it's very easy to banter back and forth. So I went back with him a couple different times and he showed me the thing that he caught. And then the next interaction just shows, like he may or may not, it just really kind of shows that, yes, well, I know exactly what you're talking about. Most people, I don't know if Eric, you knew this or not, This Pokémon evolves into something else. And depending on how many you catch, you can evolve it. So that's kind of where the conversation was going here. That's why it says, seems like you're halfway to a Sandslash, because if you catch a certain amount, you're going to get to the evolved form, which gives you more points, which gives you more levels up. So it just kind of shows that if you know kind of generally, like if you jump on a trend, even if you think it's the dumbest thing in the world, if you know how to converse about it, it just brings that much more depth.

So at that point, I admit I would have to be making a phone call to my 11-year-old nephew and saying, hey buddy, you need to help me out because I've got somebody tweeting me and I have no idea what he says.

And that's okay.

Yeah, having somebody that understands the game and is of the generation certainly is an advantage to being legitimate. You know, I guess trusted and legitimate. So, you know, I think there's not just in Pokémon, but I think there have been businesses and organizations that have pretended to be part of the conversation and think they know what they're talking about, and that disingenuous participation can do more damage than good. So—

And it's not even— I don't think it's a requirement per se that you have to know all the lingo and things Things like that, but it just really enhances the conversation even more, I think, because it just kind of leaves that person, even if it's one person, kind of thinking, you know, citizens actually knows what's going on. It's kind of crazy, you know, like they can identify with me. So if you can kind of tie that closer together, then it's even more worth it, I think.

Yeah, just let me kind of explore that topic just a little bit. So because Pokémon has So many different terms that are a part of it. And even before Pokémon, Ben was talking about a lot of things like cost-per-click and pay-per-click and digital ads and impressions and remarketing. There's such an information overload, it feels, to some individuals within the world of banking that didn't grow up in a digital presence. Have you made an effort internally to kind of either educate, either formally or informally, with staff so that, hey, Here's a little Pokémon primer, and this is why we call them trainers, and this is what a gym does, and we have a PokéStop out front, and this is what it means. Have you gotten to that point with like just staff Pokémon 101?

Yeah.

Other things when social media came around?

Yeah, no, we're in the process. I'm just in the process of launching our own more in-depth social media training because I'm, you know, our social media policy kind of highlights everything you need to know, but there's just a lot of questions out there that people are just What is the difference between liking, or retweeting, or replying? And that education component is definitely there. And I think whether that's one-on-one, or putting on a formal training, or even kind of briefing people on it. When we first did our Pokéstops, I did send out an all-staff email and kind of said, this is actually what it is, and there is a stop with the game right outside the bank. Like, I spelled it out in the email so they kind of knew a little bit about what and why we are doing it. So just kind of education is all great. I think it's needed for sure.

Well, when you decide to have that training, let me know because I'm looking for an excuse to come down and experience Herd on Herd. So maybe I can get some Pokémon training at the same time.

Sure. Happy to do it. Half of the time, honestly, Eric, is just trial and error because I think even though Jill doesn't— didn't grow up with Pokémon, I think it's like she's playing it too. So it's kind of half learning it.

I think the thing that's fun about Ann and Jill too is, you know, that they don't have to call a, you know, sort of millennial committee meeting, you know, next month to make that happen. You know, I get the impression that you're just kind of able to, you know, text or go down the hall or whatever that is and say, hey, here's what I'm seeing, here's what I'm learning. And I think, you know, some, you know, it's easy for a lot of institutions to say, hey, next month we've got the millennial committee meeting, we'll ask them then about this trend and what they think of it.

Right. There's already emails like shooting back and forth from that weekend just saying, oh my gosh, have you seen this trend? Let's get on it. And it's the quick thinking of all of our team that really makes it happen. You're right.

Very cool.

But anyway, on to visual branding. The beauty about this game is that because of augmented reality, the branding opportunity is just absolutely amazing. Like if you think about like Just the fact that there is already a built-in camera in there to kind of take a screen freeze of whatever Pokémon you are trying to catch, and the fact that everything behind it is basically fair game. So you can basically slap as many logos in there without digitally altering it at all. So these are kind of just walking around the bank. I figured, let me just take a couple photos for social media to kind of show, oh, there are many of them around our bank. in case you're looking for them. And maybe somebody— these are kind of earlier on, so I don't think anybody is really looking for these anymore. But we kind of tweeted these out really early and said, oh look, this stuff is all around our bank. Have you come by yet? And some of our drive tellers are already seeing people walking around our drive trying to find Pokémon. So it kind of behooves one person to kind of think, well, nobody at the bank plays. That's fine. Have someone download the app and try it. And then once you try it, you'll realize look at this branding opportunity. Like, can you not brand it any better?

Sure.

You know, like without any digital— like this is without any digital marketing team. I just played the game and took the photo on my phone. It's so easy to do it. And that's what I, you know, the beauty about visual branding is that it ties that trendy element to your brand. And this is like a no-brainer. Like if your bank hasn't done this already, I don't really know Why not? Because it's so easy to just do something like this once you've kind of accustomed to the game and you realize, oh my gosh, everything in the background is captured. I can have our employees doing something fun. I can have our— and I've already seen photos all around. I've seen Avidya do this, and I've seen some of our downtown merchants do this as well, like holding them in their hand. The options are limitless, basically. Yeah.

Now, when you say everything in the background is captured, I know when Periscope and Meerkat came around and live streaming video from mobile devices became a possibility, several businesses became very, I guess, leery about that because people were walking around the office and unknowingly or unintentionally scoping and doing Meerkats of employees, but not realizing that they were capturing the entire environment, and somebody could pause and zoom in, and you may have had something sensitive on your computer screen or important files on your desk that now were being exposed.

Exactly.

So do you have any, like, caution notifications about using the game inside of the bank? Because we have customers with confidentiality and privacy. And maybe Ben can comment a little bit on this. You know, not that you need to, you know, no concealed weapons or take your, you know, helmet or your hat off before entering the bank from a robbery or a security threat. But there is that possibility that somebody could accidentally take a picture of a Pokémon and boom, you've got a customer or something. So being an ex-banker myself, I think of those things as the flip side of everything that's cool, because that's the last thing that you want to leak out is something bad like that, and then you've got an identity theft or a security issue.

Right. No, definitely, I agree. And it's, you know, something— Well, sometimes they— I've already seen businesses put out little notices that say, we're not paying you to play this game, and things like that. So there's also an employee issue as well. And, you know, I personally, we haven't really thought of that as much, and it hasn't really happened yet. So I'd love to hear Ben's thoughts on that.

Yeah.

Go ahead, Ben.

We got a question somewhat related to this, but go for it.

Yeah, I mean, I think the perspective is right, you know, that I guess one of the things is to make sure that you're on top of these things and understand that trend so that you can at least educate your staff. If you saw them playing Pokémon, you might not realize that the camera's on if you weren't aware of how the tool worked, right? Or if you, you know, you wouldn't even know those sorts of things. So I think what you're doing to sort of educate the rest of the staff to say, hey, you know, we do want to embrace this, we do want tellers to be able to communicate and laugh, and we want universal bankers to be able to have conversations about which Pokémons are in the area. I think to have people around your bank that are willing to have those kinds of conversations, and then, you know, it becomes part of your culture to also say, hey, by the way, you know, obviously You know, if people are playing that, it's fine if they're playing it on the other side of the counter or out there, but just make sure that, you know, screens are not visible. I think that's really probably the thesis.

And it's the same with social media as well. It's like, you know, a lot of banks may block it completely or just not allow any usage during work, but then it's just like, well, you know, if you trust your employees and their judgment, if you train them well in all these different areas, and you kind of do train them to be a little bit more risk-averse, which I think Citizen— like honestly, since my year here, I think Citizen does a great job of that. So it kind of naturally does lend itself to each opportunity, because you could very well— like I agree with Ben that the education part has to be there as well, but if a person's judgment is also keenly sharpened in that way already, whether it's social media or Pokémon Go or whatever it is, that next trend that, you know, nowadays is moving so fast. Like, I don't really even know that some people can even keep up with it, but it's the general judgment call and the general rules are still there.

Sure. Question came in from the audience: when tweeting or sharing on Facebook, are there any concerns with the legalities of using a trademark photo such as the Poké Ball in a poster or something along those lines?

I don't think— I mean, I specifically did not use the Pokémon logo. And that's probably something that's a little bit more trademark than the other. The characters and also the characters itself are in the games. So I imagine like all the brands are posting about them in their different environments with the place in the background or the restaurant or whatever it is. I don't believe—

Yeah.

Like if it's something as simple as one element in the game, Then, you know, I think you're a little bit safer than actually using a logo.

Yep. So good, good, good question.

And I, yeah, and I bought that Pokémon, the Pikachu. It's not like we stole it.

I bought him. Is he a squeaky Pikachu or just a regular one?

It's actually a piggy bank. Isn't that funny?

Oh, very cool. How appropriate. Put a little Citizens logo and you could do Anyway, all right, we continue. I digress.

So right away after Joe sent that tweet, and there's been a, you know, there's benefits to being first out the gate, and that's usually all the different, all the different places that cover banking or just innovation in general tend to jump on it right away. And you can see here that Bank Innovation, you know, Joe's been named as Innovator of the Year and, you know, in several different lists with bank innovation. So they watch what she does. And then this is kind of all built on the fact that our social media has built up so much and we have so many people watching us that it's, it's almost kind of immediate. Like, I didn't even pitch any of these places. And the fact that our social media is so— the presence is already so magnified and people just catch on to whatever we're doing, no matter what we're doing. It's good to be a rock star, isn't it? Yeah. Standing on the shoulders of giants is what I do. In the next post, you can kind of see how American Banker caught on. ReviewTrackers, I've actually never even heard of them. They kind of just picked it up off of— just kind of lifted our tweet right out of it. It just goes to show that people are paying attention when you've kind of built up that audience already. They know that you're innovative, they know you're kind of on the edge and really responsive, then they just kind of really, you know, when something like this happens, it's just the perfect audience to kind of not even pitch media, but have them write about you.

Very cool. We have a tactical question here. So can you share with us how to make a location a lure stop? Purchased lure modules but cannot activate them.

Yes. You have to be at a stop before you can put out the lure. So what I would do is you would have to go to, you know, check into all your locations, have someone download the game and see what's the closest stops or gyms near your place. And once you're at a stop, then you can put out a lure.

Okay, and then what happens if— and this is my next question, but we had somebody else ask it for me— what happens if your bank isn't a PokéStop?

I think Ben's kind of mentioned this already, but Niantic and Nintendo are probably looking into sponsored spots. And right now there's a place on their website where you can kind of submit a stop, but I'm imagining in the next reiteration there should be plenty of sponsored options Unfortunately, if you're not close to one, I would say like your best bet right now is just to find one, even if it's a customer or if it's a restaurant, you can kind of partner up with them and do something fun, that would be really cool I think. So unfortunately if you don't have one then I can't really help you there.

Yeah, well what was interesting to me and even spending time, you know, I was up to Houghton Lake at the cabin And there's a couple of Pokéstops. And, you know, the pictures of the actual little places— like, there's a little Zoogler's Indian village that had some totem poles, and there was a picture of it. And, you know, part of me is wondering, how does that photo get into Pokémon Go? Are there people taking pictures, or do they have some, like, massive satellite, or are they scraping data off of Google Earth or Google Local? You just sit back and think of the magnitude of data that this is collecting. It's a pretty amazing thing to think about as to what's gone into making this happen. So I'm sure there's been a lot behind the scenes before.

So cool.

Make sure we get to Heard on Heard.

Yes, talk about that. Citizens Bank already puts on a monthly event called Heard on Heard. And we kind of naturally dovetailed Pokémon right into Heart on Herd. And we used it in a lot of different media pitches. So this time Jill was on several local news, and you can't really see it, but she did talk about how there were Pokéstops at Heart on Herd. And even at the radio, while I was on the radio with one of our local hosts, we were talking about Pokémon. And you know what? Open up the game, see if one was there, snap a picture. There's the branding already. So it kind of was a natural media hook, and also did— the past weekend at our event, we drew the largest crowd ever for the event. And I think it has a lot to do with Pokémon. Pokémon, as well as the weather cooling down just a little bit, and also summer, it was just an amazing time to come out to this event. And as you can see, there are plenty of people. This is so obvious that those Those boys are playing it. And it's just kind of driving that conversation in the media as well to kind of say, you know what? Citizen is on top of that trend, and they're already using it for their monthly event. And we turned it around really quickly. And I hope I did add— did I add a— what's the next slide? I hope I added a picture of what we actually did at the event. So this kind of ties right back into omnichannel experience, the digital versus the physical. And Jill, from the left side, you can kind of see that Jill shared about the fact that those pink little dots over there over the blue squares are the lures that we set out for that night. So she's sharing about, oh my gosh, there are so many lures in the digital world. And then in the physical right next to it, right in front of our bank, and there's a lure right behind our employee who's sitting behind that tent. So that's probably why all those people are loitering back there. We actually provided free charging. I pulled this together the Friday before the event, and the event happens on Saturday. So it is something that we kind of pulled together really, really quickly. And again, the free water. And surprisingly, even though we had a sign, so many people came by to visit our booth for free charging, because if you play the game, you kind of know that it drains your battery like crazy. And also, I didn't say it in this post, but we actually launched our free public access Wi-Fi in downtown Edmonds. So not only can you be at Heard on Heard and you can come to the citizens table to charge your phone, you can also access the free Wi-Fi. So it's almost kind of like a Pokémon Go landmine, or like a, like a rich area to play that game if you were looking, you were looking for a place to go that night. And then we also, we have our monthly yard signs that's put out right in front of the bank to kind of celebrate different things going on. Like Mother's Day, we could have a Mother's Day message, or our first event. And this message was actually changed the week of. We weren't even planning on it to be such a huge phenomenon, but the fact that we turned it around really quickly, everything else was changed really fast to kind of support this whole theme in the media pitch. And it ties directly back with how we got all of that media as well. So in the next slide, I think— is that— okay. And then also a lot of folks who were there also shared about, it was a perfect visual opportunity to share that there were Pokémon there too as well. And I think in this way, in the next slide, I think I highlight just how somebody— naturally when a game like this happens, social media channels just pop up out of nowhere. And we had a Pokémon Go Edmond Twitter handle that we started to engage with a lot more, because they realized that we're a big part of this conversation. And then look at how, like, they didn't even mention us, and Jill caught on to that right away. And then I jumped in there with a picture, and then right after that he was like, oh my gosh, you guys are the most amazing people ever. And, you know, it's just kind of like the fact that we can quickly respond within a few minutes of something like this and really catch on the conversation is just really the beauty of, like, even if it's one person. I did want to mention this before I have to duck out. You might think of it as, well, you know what, these are a couple of tweets. Like, you've shown me maybe 1 or 2 or 3 posts, and maybe 1 or 2 people interacted with it. But this campaign is part of Citizen's larger social media presence, which regularly generates 1.2 million people in reach, 13,000 likes on Facebook, 30,000 engagements. Like, how do you buy— like, if you were to buy that in the media, I wouldn't even know how much that would cost. I haven't even calculated that amount. But it's basically, you are reaching so many different people, and Pokémon and all these posts are kind of one segment of the larger social media strategy and presence of Citizens. Very cool.

Good.

I think that's my last slide. That's perfect.

There we go.

And I'm here for maybe one or two questions.

Sure. So if we have any questions and Anne does have to bug out, we did get a, wow, Citizens story is very impressive. I know the individual that asked that and they're not a banker, so this is probably one of the first times that they've heard the story of Citizens Bank of Edmond. And yeah. Absolutely. So, well, and you talk about real time. I had a completely different idea for this month's Banker Education Series, and it was Sunday night when I was going through my feed. I believe it was an app.

But I'm Team Valor.

Nice.

I am Team Instinct, but the only reason why I'm Team Yellow is because my husband picked it for me when I first reached level 5. I didn't realize how Yellow was such an underrated color. underdog in the team. But you know what, it probably matches us too because Citizens is an underdog and we're a small bank.

There you go.

You know what, we're going to fight our way to the top. Good.

Well, I don't know the names of the teams. I'm glad that you said Instinct because I know I'm yellow as well. The 11-year-old nephew that I mentioned earlier said, Uncle Eric, when you get to pick a team, you've got to be yellow because me and my friends are trying to raise the underdog. And I said, all right, sure. So we're— we got 2 yellows and a red.

Perfect.

Oh, very cool. Well, if there are any other questions for Anne, just make sure that you get them in quickly. Otherwise, she's gonna have to hop off. And really appreciate you spending time with us this afternoon. And I just love your stories about just what you're doing in the communities and the culture and You know, go back and listen to episode 12 if you didn't get a chance to do that and hear directly from Jill. I think that'll make even more sense as to, you know, how they're able to do this so quickly and turn things around because it's just— that's just the environment that they've built.

Exactly.

Pretty, pretty awesome.

Yep.

So cool. Good. Well, we'll let you go ahead and hop off. Ben and I will stick around for a little bit longer in case there's any other questions and kind of wrap things up. But again, appreciate you taking the time and enjoy the rest of your afternoon and go hunt some more Pokémon.

Yep, I will surely do. I'll see you out there in the Pokémon world.

Sounds good. Thanks, Anne.

Thanks, Anne.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. So, and I don't even know if hunting Pokémon is the right term. I know trainers, if you capture them. For anybody that's listening that is a true Pokémon aficionado, I'm probably completely Butchering the actual terminology, but I'm one of those enthusiastic but probably not overly educated Pokémon users.

You're right, Eric. You got to catch them all. So hashtag catch them all, right?

Hashtag catch them all. So there's a question. Do attendees get Pokécoins for attending today? The answer is no. Unfortunately. Hopefully, hopefully you get to walk away with much— something of much more value, and that's the knowledge of how to leverage the whole Poké craze within your organization. Although that might be a cheesy way of getting out of the fact that I'm just not going to send you Pokécoins.

Certainly worth thousands of Pokécoins.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. It's priceless. So, well, before we officially close, any kind of final thoughts that you'd like to share to kind of wrap things up, or observations from what Ann shared? I'll give you the opportunity for last word.

Yeah, well, thanks, Eric. You know, I think, you know, that the thesis of the whole conversation, which it was great to pull it together very quickly, so, you know, everything felt and should have felt quick, right? I mean, the idea that as marketers, even though we're in old institutions, that we can still move fast, I think is really the competitive advantage that we have in the marketplace. I did a— our local news affiliate reached out and asked me for a few thoughts, you know, about marketing on Pokémon, and I said, you know, look, as You know, for retailers, banks are no different. When you're competing against huge institutions like many of you are, you know, they may have advertising campaigns that are set for, you know, the upcoming Black Friday or a year from now, and I think the ability to move very quickly, you know, within a day, within hours, even minutes at certain times, I think is the real competitive advantage that you can build on a really small budget.

Yeah, I would agree. So the, the one example, and you kind of jogged my memory, I was going to kind of mention this at the beginning, but when I speak, there's a video I like to share from Eric Qualman off of his Socialnomics book, and he's got several iterations of it, but in that video he gives an example of the Oreo cookie Tweet, and they called it news jacking and the instantaneous real time. And and if you're not familiar with Oreo cookie, what happened a few years ago when the power went out at the Super Bowl? There were some Oreo cookie people that were together watching the Super Bowl, and the power went out, and they very quickly said, "Well, can we capitalize on this?" Again, thinking nimble and and kind of being in the moment, and they very quickly put out a tweet with a hashtag that tied it to the Super Bowl because everybody was watching that that said. You can still dunk in the dark. And it had a picture of an Oreo cookie with a glass of milk, but in a dark room so you could barely make it out. And that went viral, went nuts. And I often joke about if that were in the world of banking, how a banker would have reacted. There would have been a discussion. You talked about, well, you know, let's meet next month at the millennial committee and see how we want to address this, or maybe compliance has to review it. And so, you know, maybe a week or two goes along and you finally put your tweet out, you can still get a mortgage in the dark, and the, you know, the recency is gone, the relevancy is completely blown away, and, you know, nobody even knows what you're talking about. So Oreo cookies, there's always a good reason to talk about Oreo cookies anyway, but, you know, thinking about that and how it would have gone in a bank, It's very similar to this pokey word. You've reacted quickly, citizens reacted quickly. We've got to be much more current and in the moment. So hopefully some good lessons for everybody and some great questions, and certainly appreciate everybody taking their time. So with that, we will wrap up episode number 15 of the Banker Education Series. We appreciate you joining us, and the recording will be made available here very soon. And I encourage you to share it with those in your office and friends and anybody else that you'd like to educate on the topic. Feel free to subscribe to future shows and check out some of the other shows that we've had. I think there's some good stuff and I've been blessed to have been joined by some really, really smart folks like Ben and Ann in the past. With that, enjoy the remainder of your week. Go capture, hunt, collect, whatever version you want to say, your pokey creatures. And, uh, we will hopefully see you online and here next month on the Banker Education Series webinar show. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye.