327: Growth Marketing in the Crowded Space of FinTech with Michael Goodbody CMO of Dave

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I'm Alan Hart, and this is Marketing Today. Today on the show, I've got Michael Goodbody. He's the new CMO at Dave, and Dave is a leading neobank challenging the current banking players in the market. And on the show today, we talk about his pathway to becoming CMO at Dave, his background in journalism, financial services, and growth marketing, how he thinks about marketing and the success that can be attributed neobanks in the space of financial services and what's driving that, frankly, specifically a focus on products, products that achieve what people are looking to do and counter the competition. We talk about the fintech space. It's a huge market with players like Cash App, Robinhood, to name a couple. And we talk about talent and what he's looking for, for marketing talent at Dave. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Michael. Goodbody. Michael, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me.

So I don't get to say this in every interview, but I hear that I should never, never challenge you to a rugby match. So, uh, tell me about this, this rugby career I think that you had before becoming a marketer.

Yeah, I think, I think it's usually, you know, every time you introduce yourself, uh, a new company or something like that, it's usually the first, uh, Fun fact that I go with, which is I'm pretty sure I have. So, I played a lot of rugby as a kid, as you can probably hear. I'm from the UK originally and pretty on the larger side, to put it that way, for anyone that meets me in person. And yeah, I think I might have claim for the shortest professional rugby career, possibly even the shortest professional sports career because I actually, as I said, sort of grew up playing rugby. And after I got my sort of— worked in a couple of jobs in the journalism field and then sort of Actually, got laid off from one of them and was playing at a relatively high sort of level of amateur rugby in London. And one of my sort of teammates was also an agent, and he ended up sort of approaching me and asking me if I'd be interested in sort of offering my services around for professional teams in France, actually. So, I ended up, yeah, getting a 2-year contract to go play professionally in France, in Saint-Nazaire, which is sort of near Nantes, and sort of So, I took that on, moved out there, and, yeah, managed to— I ended up living there for a year, but managed to break my shoulder in the very first sort of— I'm not even sure if it was the first training session or the first game. It was like a deteriorating situation. But, yeah, and ended up playing about 20 minutes, and then sort of coming off and getting surgery and sort of recovering from that, and then deciding that maybe this isn't a great career. You know, if you're 20 minutes into your first pitch presentation at an agency, suddenly you just get some kind of debilitating, um, debilitating wound that stops you from performing. So yeah, that was— that's my kind of claim to fame.

Okay, it's impressive even if it was short, right?

Yeah, well, that's the thing. I mean, I think I got paid to do a sport, so I'm technically a former professional athlete, but you know, that's— that— it's— it's very much a technicality.

You mentioned, um, you know, having a role as a journalist before. Like, what was your path from— from athletics, your paid athletics, to, uh, becoming the chief marketing officer at Dave?

Yeah, I mean, I think particularly being sort marketing at a sort of a tech company. I definitely feel that my pathway, even beyond the sort of sports side of things, is very unusual. As I sort of mentioned a couple of minutes ago, I started out actually, pretty much my entire college career and actually through high school, I wanted to be a sports journalist. My uncle and my grandfather were both pretty famous professional journalists, sports journalists in the UK. And just never questioned that that was the direction that I was going in. And so I sort of went through university with that as my preferred route. And when I left university, sort of did a bunch of internships and then just started to look at that as a career and discovered fairly early on that sports journalism, whilst it sounds amazing and it's kind of a fun thing to do, is not a very well-paid way of getting into the professional world. So I sort of ended up looking at financial journalism. as a sort of somewhere to actually, you know, in between get some money and earn a decent wage, but also, you know, stay true to that kind of career path that I wanted to go on and spent the first few years of my career as a financial journalist and then moved from there. And so, I think, you know, my path has been dictated by that to some degree. And I'd moved from journalism, I went into a PR agency. From there, I sort of started moving out more into kind of brand marketing and just gradually kind of added things on from that point, but always coming at it from the perspective of having had that like 4 or 5 years of getting pitched a lot as a journalist and sort of being able to really sort of understand the story and really sort of see what pops out when you're looking at any given kind of, I guess, when you're looking at a situation, trying to really get through to the narrative, understand what the consumer wants or what the reader wants. And that's been very important and helpful for me in my career. You know, I was a— as a financial journalist, you have to be very data-driven. You know, I did a lot of analysis of sort of takeaways and company results. And so I always had that kind of like storytelling through data as a core skill set that I learned early on, and it's been phenomenally useful for me as I've kind of broadened away from that and moved into performance channels and other parts of the sort of marketing ecosystem.

What was the transition from journalism into business?

So I went from— I was the editor of a magazine briefly in the sort of financial technology space and just decided I was— I sort of decided that wasn't quite the right place for me to be. And so I ended up going into a PR agency. So that was the first sort of move from like to the dark side, as everyone used to call it. From there, I sort of, I then was there for a year or so, went in-house at an investment bank at the time. And then just if you think about 10, 15 years ago, it was all about, you know, back then, you know, communications and social media in particular, like it ended up kind of being part of our world. And so to some extent, there's still that sort of connection today. But that was sort of how I started to expand out was, you know, really sort of taking on moving from PR and comms into sort of like organic social. And then from there, you know, bringing that into sort of more of the paid element. And then that was the sort of move that The move from purely earned media into paid media and then sort of growing from that point.

Gotcha. Well, and what brought you eventually, like what brought you to Dave? And describe Dave too for people that have been living under a rock.

Yeah, living under a rock. Yeah. So I mean, Dave is a really interesting, I would say, the way that we describe ourselves as a neobank, we're a digital bank. We're part of the kind of fintech ecosystem. Dave's about 4 or 5 years old and was started back in, I think, 2017 by Jason, who's our CEO now, and some of the co-founders really targeting the kind of overdraft fees issue. So I think Jason had been hit really hard by, as I think a lot of us have been at different times in our life, by the fact that when you run out of money, you sort of dip into an overdraft and get charged $30, $40 for it. And so set up Dave as a way really to identify when you were going to go into that sort of overdrawn status and be able to give you access to short-term liquidity, $50, $70, $3 just to sort of get you through that so you didn't incur that fee. That was the original concept. And from there, we kind of grew out over the last 4 or 5 years to be— I think we have about 6 million members. We have about 2 million bank account or debit users and one of the leading sort of neobanks in that finance space. And so similar to if you were to look at other new entrants like Chime or some of the work that Cash App has done to move into that space as well, we sort of see ourselves in that sort of group of companies that are taking a core problem and trying to solve it with a degree of differentiation in financial services. And then from there, earning that sort of customer relationship and building it out to become, you know, in our sort of strategic perspective, we're looking to be in that primary banking relationship for our users over time.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, and so you've got a really interesting background, like journalism, covering financial services, now in financial services, and at the early stages of like social media as you made that transition in the PR. Like, in your mind, do you think about those 3 things coming together and how has that contributed to your success currently?

Yeah, absolutely. I think I still remember when I first, I guess the first sort of time that I moved, that I really sort of broadened into pure, into a, when I moved into sort of tech from bigger companies was when I moved to TransferWise, which is a big international money transfer platform, kind of Venmo for international remittances. And was at that point in time where Facebook was just launching video. And I think a lot of TransferWise's early growth was due to our ability to really crack that medium as it sort of exploded. And so I think a lot of my career has been sort of at that point where I've been able to be at companies that are able to take advantage of some of these new trends as they're rising in the market and understand the value of that and lean into it and build a business on the back So, you know, that certainly happened at TransferWise, and we've seen it as well, even I think with when I was at Credit Karma, I think they were early on before I got there, really, like, I think a big part of their growth was sort of taking a performance marketing mindset and cracking TV and sort of OTT and some of those channels as well. So, I think, yeah, just it's been interesting to see that and be part of those trends as they're coming. And we're seeing that now as well with things like TikTok and, you know, how you can build a brand, you can build a company on the back of, like, you know, if you can be an early adopter of some of these things.

Yes, for sure. And I mean, you're relatively new into the role of CMO. If I got my math right, you started in January, so you're roughly 6 months as we're doing this interview. How did you think about coming into the role that you're in now and like goals, vision, etc.? Like, what were you thinking?

Yeah, I mean, I think I had a really— I probably had the best foundational experience for that move that you could possibly have. I was at Credit Karma for 5 years. And the last 3 or 4 years there was, you know, Credit Karma made a decision a year or so after I got there to kind of verticalize the business, to create, to reorganize the marketing department around core, like, verticals beyond just that, having a centralized marketing infrastructure. And they were at that scale point where it was kind of hard to do new things because there was so much of the brain space was being dedicated to just the existing business and growing the existing business. And so, I actually, moved over there early on to be the head of marketing within— it was a sort of lateral move to be the head of marketing for our tax business at the time. We launched Credit Karma Tax, which is a competitor to TurboTax, H&R Block, those sorts of companies. And so, was the first vertical marketer at Credit Karma. And through that next 3 or 4 years, was able to effectively grow that and attach more responsibility and more verticals became part of what I was working on. And so, by the end of that, I was actually kind of running a full-stack marketing team, 20 to 30 people. We had our own creative function, we had our own growth marketing function, we had our own engagement function. So when I moved over to Dave, actually, it didn't feel like a big step from that perspective because I'd sort of had the whole scope of a marketing organization under me and in a very similar space. Dave and Credit Karma are generally serving very similar types of users and users that have very similar types of problems. So I think when I came in, even though I'm relatively new to the CMO role, I felt like I'd got at least a few years of very direct experience on how to run a team, how to run an organization, how to run strategy from the marketing and growth perspective. And I think that really helped me. And so in addition to that, I think I came into Dave with— this is the 3rd fintech that I've been at that I've grown. And there's a lot of commonality to what works in fintech and who's grown, who's been successful. And so I've been able to not just work at those companies, but also look at a lot of the companies around me and see how they were growing. And so I think for me, the first thing was to just come in and apply that lens of what has worked, what works in this space, to what had been done at Dave and what was being done at Dave, and then look at, you know, where are the gaps and what do we need to change with that skill set and with that experience in mind. And so, a lot of what I was doing early on was, you know, again, I guess I'm still early on, but there's been a lot. We've managed to achieve a lot in that time. And so, a lot of that was about coming in and looking at, you know, how we go to market, how we, you know, the approach that we're taking, the sort of technology that we've got in place, the channel mix that we've got in place, and just trying to assess that against what I know has worked for myself at other companies and also at other companies in the fintech space. And so really applying that. I think Dave, as an example, is a really interesting company from the perspective that I think they had extreme product market fit. So they came in and they launched this product. The root of the Dave product is that you connect your bank account through Plaid. And you're able— basically, we pull in your transactional and your income data from that, and we run a machine learning algorithm against it. And we're able to figure out pretty instantly kind of how much money we're willing to advance you in that moment. And so this week, we've just— we'll talk about that in a minute, but we just increased the expansion of that up to $500. But effectively, if you think about, you come in, you sign up, you connect your bank account, we'll lend you up to $500 instantly. So that's a very very strong value prop to acquire people. But I think going, you know, for me, when I came in and looked at where the company was at, I think they'd hit that moment of they had hypergrowth and then that growth kind of— it didn't stop, but it wasn't hypergrowth anymore for a bit of time. And that was primarily actually driven by stimulus and just how much liquidity was pumped into the American economy that made it a little bit less necessary for people to need products like Dave. And so it grew, you know, it grew, it still grew well, but it wasn't growing at that previous rate. And I think what had happened with the company was that we looked at other players in the space And we looked at, you know, how do we— how else can we grow? And I think that's a question that a lot of companies that get to that kind of hypergrowth and then sort of slightly leveling off will go through that moment of like, how else can we grow? How do we add something on? And so, the big thing for me when I came in was just like, hey, you've got like, we're the market leader in this space, we're the best at what we do. And so, the most important thing for us is to stay focused on that and think about how we innovate And how we drive up that value prop and how we amplify that value prop for our members and think about alternative ways of engaging our existing users through the lens of acquisition through our core value prop and going broad from that. I think every company in the financial services space, certainly, that has kind of grown fast over the last 4 or 5 years has taken that same approach. It's pretty easy for me to be like, hey, there's a rule set here, let's make sure we're following it. And just making that slight tweak, I think, It made a lot of sense. There was a lot of buy-in internally, and this has been really fruitful for us to sort of really capture what was there. Because at the end of the day, we had just an amazing product. We had an amazing product. And so, I think that's the— sometimes you can forget that when you're sitting inside a company. And I had the advantage of being outside and sort of looking in and being envious of what Dave was able to do. And then coming in and having that perspective was actually pretty useful.

Yeah. I think nailed it there at the end too. The value prop and the product was extremely, would you say, extreme market fit originally. And allowed you to amplify that over time and now try to figure out how to take it to the next level. I mean, so you mentioned just this, I think you said just this week, you guys upped your limit to $500 that you're willing to extend to customers. I mean, to me, I spent a little time in the credit card space. That feels like a move from like, hey, I'm just going to spot you $50, You're now like in the, like, you're bumping into the, what was historically called like secured credit card space, right? Like, like small amounts of lending, but it allows you to build credit essentially. Do you guys see like you're moving into that space or the credit lending space in general versus being a neobank? Or is it just an extension of your existing banking products in your mind?

Yeah, I think that anytime you want to grow, like the root problem for any company That's been trying to grow in financial services over the last probably, I mean, at least 20 years that I'm aware of, but probably 50, 100 years is inertia. And it's been the ability to actually differentiate enough to get somebody to move their bank account or their financial services relationship over to you. So if you think about it from that perspective and through that lens, what is important as you come into, if you want to change that dynamic, a new entrant is to be incredibly good at one thing that's very important for a subset of people. And you want to be able to solve one financial problem really well. And I remember when I met— the first lunch I had with Christo, who was the CEO at TransferWise when I got there, and his analogy was the Gmail-Hotmail transition. And maybe some people remember that. I remember that. But there was this idea that Gmail gave everyone that 10x better product, right? 10x better storage. And it made it a no-brainer to switch over. And so I think in financial services, when you're dealing with the problem of inertia, most of the reason why there's a problem of inertia is because it's a very consistent set of products. It's very commoditized, and people just sort of don't see clear differences between it. And so for us, it's about how are we 10 times better at something that is meaningfully important to people. So short-term credit, 67% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. paycheck right now. And of those, fairly significant proportion are struggling paycheck to paycheck. So we think short-term credit, which is effectively figuring out ways of closing the gap between one paycheck and the next paycheck, is primary financial need for about 25% of American adults. So what we have there is there's definitely probably 50% of Americans that this is just irrelevant to, who don't have to worry about whether they can fill up their car with gas or pay their rent or any of that sort of stuff. But to the audience that have to worry about that. We want to be hyper relevant and we want to solve that core problem 10 times better than their existing bank. And then that allows us to develop that relation, like take that part of their relationship away from the existing system and grow that with them and allows us the opportunity to earn a seat at the table with that consumer for the rest of their financial services needs if we can sort of service that. So as we think about launching $500, I think it's important. One of the things I think that we we were limited by was previously we would lend up to $250. By going to $500, it's allowing us to service a broader set of users who, A, there's that core need of rent, utilities, gas, whatever it is that still is a problem for a large set of consumers, even in that $100,000+ income bracket, but that maybe $250 doesn't quite stretch to cover that need. And so they use a different financial product. Or it also allows us to stretch up into more of the discretionary spend area as well. So what we're doing there is basically listening to consumers, listening to understanding what people want, which is access to more money and getting it quicker and solving that problem. And in so doing, we're looking to expand that market, but it's not necessarily expanding it. I think when I've talked to people about this in the past, it's like you're trying to move upmarket with it. It's less about that and it's more about just being relevant to a broader set of people who have the same set of needs. But in so doing, I think in some way trying to move a little bit away from Can we just service the needs to the wants? And so seeing what happens there. So I think for me, what's interesting about the product that we offer is we obviously advance up to $500. It's basically we leverage any income data and transactional data that we have so we can lend that against income, like traditional income paychecks. We can leverage it against income from— if you've got regular income coming in, if you're a college student, get from your parents, or if you've got unemployment income, those are all things that we factor into our underwriting decisioning. And this allows us to kind of take that up the next level and be able to kind of unlock that short-term credit for people that maybe might be looking at using a credit card or might be looking at using a personal loan to fund something. So we're interested to see how that changes. And I think that continues to be like, we've done $60 million advances now. So we have just so much data that we can push the boundaries constantly on what we offer and still drive the same return profile.

And that's what we're looking to do.

That's awesome.

Huge market and so many competitors and in very different ways, right? You've got your area, which is like the neobanks, but you've also got the financial investing platforms, et cetera. Not to mention, probably not really fintech anymore, but you've got cryptocurrency stuff that's kind of on the fringes of that. How do you continue to stand out in that market? Because I know you were early into the market, but I mean, and obviously it's making these enhancements in part, like we just talked about, But how else do you think about it?

In a way, it's simple. The strategy is really simple. Like when you write it on a piece of paper, it's like, oh yeah, that makes sense. And there's lots of examples of how it works. And reality of it's really hard. And I think that, again, if you want to earn market share in finance, I think financial services is going through that e-commerce moment. And some of that is, it's probably a longer moment than maybe some of us were expecting the industry but are going through this transitional shift towards online services because bricks and mortar are less meaningful for that product than they have been. And I think that is an inevitable shift that is happening, will happen. And I think what you've seen over the last few years with new entrants coming in is the advantage of being able to play without the bricks and mortar overhead to offer financial services products. And so there's a lot of frothiness in the market that I think we're going to see shake out over the next couple of years. But the sort of core trend that we're seeing is very much that in the same way that it was unthinkable to buy— I remember a time when I was like, I'll never buy clothes online. I will never buy shoes online. I have to go to a shop. Now I never do anything but buy those things online. And the industry solved that problem with easy returns and fast shipping and stuff. So that's what's happening in financial services is that we're a company with 300, 400 employees and we can service 10 million users and we don't need bricks and mortar. We don't need that same overhead. ahead to distribute our product and to drive trust. And what that allows us to do is provide the sort of service that you and I are probably getting from our bank, but to provide that to everybody. And I think that's been always the tension, particularly in America, is that you got 14,000 banks, but you still have a massive underserved population. If you're lower income, lower credit, the sort of bottom 50% of America still primarily gets monetized through fees and, well, mostly fees, to be honest with you, from the banking perspective, because they don't have enough money for the banks to sort of churn through and earn by lending it out, which is generally money out of the higher income user base. And so for us, we're able to offer that premium service to that user base, that lower income group at a much lower overhead cost. And that allows us to build a great business while still not nickel and diming and hitting you on hidden fees and charging $30 every time you go overdrawn or any of that sort of thing. So that's the sort of the ecosystem shift that we're looking at. And then within that, what you're seeing is the way that, again, customer acquisition has always been the biggest problem in financial services in terms of growing new brands. It's a really hard thing to do because if you talk to most people, when you're like, how did you— people have got, for the most part, they'll get their bank account when 2 things happen, right? Their parents open it for them or they move somewhere and their existing bank does not cover that area as well and it's not geographically near enough. So they've gone with a different provider. Those are the 2 reasons you open a bank account. That's pretty much it. With regional no longer being that important anymore, what it's allowed us to do is to think about it less about that, more about use cases. And so the companies that are doing really well in this space, like, I think Cash App is a great example, number one rated financial service, number one downloaded financial services app in the App Store pretty much every day, all day, every day. And they sold— again, if I think back when I moved to the US 7, 8 years ago and I was trying to move money from, like, pay somebody back for something, or if I was trying to move money from one account to somebody else's account, it was really hard. It was this high-friction thing. And Cash App and Venmo came in and solved that problem really well, 10 times better than the existing banks, and built a user base from it. Credit Karma did that with credit scores prior to them doing it. It seems crazy to think about that now because it's so commoditized, but they did that with— they took a fairly opaque score that was, you had to pay to get, or you had to sort of run these free trials that were pretend free for a month and then ended up hitting you with a hidden Like $30 fee every month.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. It's like before, if you can, as soon as you notice that you're like, damn it, this free thing cost me $100. And they changed the dynamic of those industries by, again, finding that one thing that was really burning a hole in the consumer and solving it. And I think TransferWise, where I was at before, that was the same thing. It was international money transfer, which just wasn't that important to the banks. It was like less than 1% for most banks' revenue. And so they didn't care that much about it. They didn't want— they provide the service, but it was pretty terrible. And so anyone that's done well in this space has taken that core value, like taken that core problem and solved it really well. And Robinhood applies that and Coinbase applies that as it relates to crypto. Obviously that's a new market, but still. And on the other side, but the other side of that is like you take that moment and you solve that problem and suddenly you've got a customer that thinks about you within their financial services ecosystem. And then it's about cross-selling to that user base and broadening that relationship. And so again, you see that with everyone that's been successful in the market is like, how do you force somebody out of their existing provider, bring them over over to you with your core value prop. And then actually the hard part in all of this is then the retention and the cross-sell. And you've seen a lot going on there with Credit Karma. I launched the money product, which was our sort of checking and banking account, the tax service, all these adjacent kind of cross-sell type opportunities. And you see that at Robinhood as well with debit cards. You see that at Chime with their associated credit products as well. So you see all of that happening, that rebundling, but it's about how do you get somebody out of their existing relationship to off with. And that's sort of, as you look at the growth model, I do think fintech, you're part of a one-time inevitable shift that you can't really see happening in the moment because it's like a glacier. But you wait 5 years and you look back and you're like, wow, that changed a lot. That's where we're at. That's what we're going through. And the commonality of who's successful is all about being amazing at the core value prop.

Well, how does that, how you're competing in the market today translate to what does marketing look like at Dave? How do you balance performance marketing, cross-sell, upsell, and brand as like 3 different components, I guess?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone's purely solved it.

No, I'm sure. But if you have, this is the perfect show to tell everyone.

Yeah, I think, you know, there's definitely— the way I think about it is that you need to build a brand. So most of the companies that are in this space are heavily performance-focused. And that is part of, again, at the end of the day, because we're not charging fees to our users and we're sort of generating— every single dollar that we make is an optional dollar that the user has chosen to pay us for added value of the core service. Our actual core service, like lending you money, we don't charge anything for. So it's completely free. We make money off— half of our revenue is from tips. So people tip us. About 50% of people us a tip when they take an advance. So, in that scenario, the biggest challenge that any of us have really, and you look at Robinhood as well, Robinhood provides free trading. It's a good example. Our customer acquisition costs, because we make so much less money at a user level, because we're trying to strip out all of that cost from the system, generally, in fintech, customer acquisition costs are very lean compared to every other sort of bank. And so, banks typically will pay pay $300, $400 for a user. We pay $20. And your typical fintech will be kind of in that $20 to $50 range. And that makes it hard to— that means you have to look after the pennies. Otherwise, there's not a lot of room in there. And again, that's part of what we're trying to do. We're serving underserved communities and we're providing them with great— we're trying to provide them with great quality products like top 1% type banking products. But we're doing it— we're trying to strip the cost out of the system and marketing is part of that. So we don't want to be spending basically basically spending our users' money on marketing if we don't have to. So a big part of that is we definitely come from the perspective of performance marketing. And I think every company in this space, again, heavily performance-driven. Credit Karma, TransferWise, everywhere I've been has been insanely focused on that very data-driven. The funny thing, but then the opposite part of that when you deal with it is that financial services are all about trust, right? And so there's this tension, which is you can kind of win people over with performance marketing. You can acquire them to some degree. And always low-hanging fruit in that market. But in order to retain and expand that relationship, it's about building trust. It's about building longevity, like a sense of longevity. People don't want to give money to a company that they think is 3 years old and it's going to disappear in 10 years or in 5 years or in 2 years. And so that tension exists in everything that we do. So I think for me, when you see the stage of fintechs of growth in this marketplace, a lot of it is about early on, it's about like, hey, let's get signal on product market fit. Like, are we Is there a there there? And then you can pour a certain amount of gasoline on that just through performance marketing. But then it becomes about, like, how do you do it in a way that builds a brand? I would argue Credit Karma is a great example of that, having been able to work with some amazing marketers and executives there. I learned a ton from Greg Lawler, the CMO there. And I think the way of thinking about that sort of journey, the way I look at that is, like, they applied a brand layer on top of performance marketing, but in a way that still allowed everything to be efficient. Think about customer acquisition, but as you gradually mature as a company, you think about how you layer in brand into that. So it's not about having a separate brand marketing budget for us at this point in time, a separate brand marketing mindset. It's about thinking about how do you create user ads and assets that acquire, but how do you do that in a way that like leaves a mark that's ownable. And I think that's what a lot of companies do really badly when they're looking at performance marketing is you think purely about, I want to acquire the user, I want to drive the click and you don't see and nobody can tell if it's an ad from you or your competitor. That means you're just investing in that click and you're not, for every eyeball that doesn't click, you're not doing anything. And I think that's how I think about that, that the approach is like, how do you, and the big thing that I've been trying to do at Day since I got here it was like, how do we make sure that everyone that sees our ad, like, it still performs, right? It's still driving acquisition, it's still driving usage, but that it's also ownable and that you can't just strip off the logo or strip off the sort of the brand name and just, and not know whether it's us or one of 10 competitors. That's a really important way of thinking about how to do that, like that next phase of growth.

Well, that, I mean, that kind of takes me right into the next question I had for you, which is like, what type of talent are you looking for to actually do that? I mean, definitely creativity is one aspect, but tell me a little bit about the type of marketing talent you're looking for.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think generally as well, I think my read of this would be that marketing went from, certainly in the space I'm in, went from being an art to a science, right, over the last 10 years. And as the platforms that we market on and the ways that we apply it increasingly do a lot of the science for you, particularly in terms of algorithmic bidding and value bidding, value optimization, et cetera. That then, to me, what I'm seeing is the need to being able to straddle both of those worlds. So when I'm looking for talent, I'm either looking for creative growth marketers who understand the value of creative and understand how to differentiate through the look and feel, or it's sort of data-driven creatives. And it's not that easy to find them, but that's where you get, to me, that's where you get the true unlock. I think if you end up, if you're not to think through that lens, then you tend to end up swaying the company one way or the other. And then it becomes up to, in my experience, it's kind of up to me or up to other sort of leading executives to try and keep the balance, keep the harmony, which is really hard to do. Even at the companies I've been at, I've seen the way that you hire talent swaying you in one direction or the other, and you almost need to keep it on that fine balance between the two. So, I think the way I think about it is when When you're hiring, you're looking for inquisitiveness, you're looking for light behind the eyes, you're looking for passion, you're looking for just the ability to dig deep in the topic and just sort of think laterally. So to me, it's less about deep, deep expertise in what you're doing, and it's more like a certain type of person that's willing to, that's just inquisitive about the nature of their work and willing to learn and expand their view of things.

I mean, the notion of how you describe them, creative growth marketers or data-driven creatives, at the first outset, I was like, Aren't those the same things? But they're not, but they're very close to each other. Like, I could see how they would work well together if you're trying to build a team, right?

Yeah. I mean, they're actually really different, I think, in my mind.

Tell me more about it because I want to make sure I understand it completely.

Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things that I think I saw, it's not really something that's scalable, but like, I think where I've seen this at its best is sort of like I would take creatives who were working on some of our, you know, like building our creative assets when I was at TransferWise and I would have them run Facebook campaigns so they could, because, you know, they would and they hated it. They really hated it. But what it allowed them to do was just see how they could interpret like the performance of that creative through the data. And a creative will look at something in a very different way to a performance marketer. Like a performance marketer will look at relative performance of different assets and they'll be like, this is better than this, right? This one drives better conversion than this. They'll look at the underlying metric that they're sort of looking at and they'll figure it out, but they generally speaking won't know why. They will just say this one works better than this one. And so the true unlock is when you can look at creative and understand why it's doing something better. And so a good example of that is I I remember showing somebody, one of the creatives, the data and they were looking at it and it's like, oh, well, this one has the view curve on it in terms of when people are dropping off. They could identify exactly when people start dropping off and the creative shift that was happening there or the pacing, and they tighten that up and that then retains the user through that whole journey or that whole asset, that whole creative. And so that ability to be like, that wasn't something that I think the growth marketers on the team were even thinking about. They were just looking at this and being like, okay, just wouldn't even occur to them that after 4 seconds people are dropping off, they're like, well, they don't like the ad or they like it, but they don't like it that much or whatever. But the creative is able to look at it and be like, what happened then? And so I think that that's a good example of like a creative-driven sort of being able to look at it through the data. And then I think on the other side of it, it's more about— it often becomes more about like being able to identify the types of assets that are performing. I think it's unlikely that a growth marketer will ever get that deep in like how an asset works, but well, they might. But when you sort of hire in growth, like creative-minded ones, they're much better at looking at like what the competitive set is doing and identifying types of creative that work and they're much better at like looking at maybe how their work is doing and just try and understand like the sort of types of creative or the different sort of, I guess, sort of platform, like the different types of asset that might work for a particular platform or something like that. But that tends to be the breadth of it. I haven't seen too many people that can close the gap between that.

No, it makes sense. I appreciate you going a little deeper there. And if there are data-driven creatives or creative growth marketers Absolutely.

100%. Drop me a note. My LinkedIn is open.

Yeah, exactly. Awesome. One of the things we like to do on this show is get to know you a little bit more. We know you've had one of the shortest professional rugby careers of all time, but beyond that, has there been an experience of your past that defines or makes up who you are today?

Yeah, I mean, there are obviously plenty. I think professionally for me, it was making the wrong decision on a career path. I think for anyone out there that ever gets in a bad situation from a work, or is down about a work decision that they've made, or a job that they've taken that doesn't turn out, I would say that's probably the most important experience you'll ever have in your career. And so, for me, I think that's true in particular. I think I worked for some big companies upfront, and part of my push into more of the sort of marketing mix and the tech, the sort of last 10 years of my career were very much dictated by me making the wrong decision about moving to a company and working for a company that didn't necessarily have the same values that I have. And I think for me, that was very transformative in my professional career, was just understanding that, particularly when you're a marketer, and particularly back then, because I still own some of that element of comms and sort of communication and positioning a brand, it's really hard to represent a company, be that representative, that face of a company, if you don't believe in what they do. And so that to me was the big transition point. I'm not going to name the company, but Definitely. I remember joining and within like a week being like, oh, this isn't what I imagined it to be. And so, you know, I would say go out there and, you know, make a big decision and make it badly and fail fast. And it really helps you understand what's important to you in terms of what you want to learn and where you want to grow. And I think that was the big thing for me, was like just making that wrong career decision because it allowed me to sort of take a, you know, massive pay cut to go and do what I wanted to do. And then from there, I've got, you know, I was able to grow a career in a different direction really fast. I'm, you know, much happier about now. That's awesome.

Awesome. If you had advice for your younger self starting this journey all over again, what would it be?

If I had— so, probably go and be an engineer, be a software engineer. I think that would be advice I'd give to anyone, like, 10 years ago, rather than be in marketing or any other discipline. But no, I mean, yeah, I think it's hard because I think, you know, I definitely am a person that, like, I'm sure if I came back in time and told myself something, I wouldn't believe myself. You know, I'd have to make the mistake myself and, like, get there in my own way. But I think, again, like, For me, it's like there are 2 things, 2 or 3 rules, a piece of advice that I give people on my team, which is that I would always give to myself as well, which is don't be afraid to dive into something that's broken. I think that's always where I've found the hardest, the things that look hardest from the inside than the outside. And I think in particular when I picked up tax, the Credit Karma tax business and marketing that product when it was in year 2 or 3 at Credit Karma, it was just like, from the outside, it looked like a really tough moment for that business. It was not growing. It had kind of grown, it exploded year 1, and then struggled in year 2. And it didn't look like a very sensible decision to go in there. But it's often the best decision you can make to go in and pick up something that's broken, because it's much easier to fix something that's broken than it is to sort of get something that's humming and working really well and taking that to the next level. So I think I'm always sort of, don't be afraid by taking opportunities that seem daunting and seem like you're onto, you're picking up something that's on the way down, because it's often the easiest thing to turn around. And that is always where you get the most credit in your career, is like getting either a turnaround or getting something like getting meaningfully noticeable results in a relatively short period of time. So I think there's that. And I think going back to the sort of example I had before, it's just like, make sure that you're passionate about, or at least somewhat passionate about what you're doing and that you buy into the mission of the company that you're working for. Because I think without that, it's hard to push yourself like beyond. It's hard to really like break down barriers if you don't feel that you're doing something that's important as well as, you know, you're building a career. And I mean, some people do that because I think that they're managed like, you know, maybe they're focused on the reward or whatever, which, you know, is a different mindset and each to their own. But for me it's like, you know, make sure you're passionate about what the company's doing and challenge yourself and never stop learning. The moment you stop learning, get outta there, go somewhere else.

Well, along those lines, like is there a topic you think marketers need to learn more about or maybe something you're trying to learn more about yourself either way.

Yeah, I think for me it's been, I'm super interested in behavioral psychology, behavioral finance, and I think getting deep on how humans think, irrespective of whether it's related to marketing, is something that you need to do because I think it helps you to really sort of study the human mind when you're trying to be a marketer because effectively you're trying to change the way people think about something. If you just look at that, you can look at that purely through the grounds of how marketing is done, how marketing is successful. But I think in that scenario, you're just looking at the output and what output is successful, but you're not understanding the true reason why behind it. So, I think for me, again, when I first started out in that sort of marketing switch, I was working at an investment bank called Dresdner Kleinwort. And there are a few moments in my life where I'm like, this is a bit of an aha moment. And I used to do the marketing and the communications around our equity research team. And there was a gentleman there called James Montier, who is a behavioral psychologist, behavioral finance psychologist. He's a super smart guy, and he was going into the psychology behind financial decisions, and that was kind of what he wrote about. And I found that to be fascinating, and I learned a ton of lessons there that have helped me as I think about building marketing and trying to understand what appeals to consumers, and not just what appeals to consumers, but also what what gets them to take action. Because I think there's 2 sides to marketing. There's rational and irrational. And often the difference between great marketing is making a rational argument with an irrational kind of decision moment, like drive. Because you're trying to get, you know, it comes back to taxes, right? When I was trying to market taxes, you're trying to get somebody to, you know, you're trying to build up a reason like, why would you use us? Well, here are the 5 reasons. Here's where we differentiate. Like, here are our reasons to believe, right? But like, why are you gonna do it now? Why are you gonna change now? Why are you gonna do it this year instead of next year? Why are you gonna take this decision and take this action today and now. And again, I think in commerce, right, it's that you're appealing to a certain, the sort of the desire to own something, to have something, right? In finance, it's very different. And you have to really think about it that way of, you know, how am I gonna drive that? How am I gonna get the irrational brain to act on the rational decision quite often that the user has made? And so, that's, I think, yeah, spend time with behavioral science. Like, go listen to Dan Ariely, and that will help you a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. Funny thing is, used to work— I used to share a wall with Dan Ariely's team. It was, uh, it was quite interesting. But yeah, I loved your comment that you just used. It's marketing is a lot of times making a rational argument for the irrational brain, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's like you have to convince— you have to convince the rational side of the brain, but like once you've done that, your job is not done because you still have to get someone that'll take action on it. And that is always about like Why do it now? Like, there's, you know, there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of irrational. And it's interesting when you do user research, you often find like people will tell you something and I'm sitting there going, well, that, yeah, but if you are, you have to figure out how to both ask someone the question and then test them in reality. Because when you put someone in a rational frame of mind, you ask them what they think, they will tell you what they think when they're thinking rationally, but they won't behave like that. And you have to figure out how to close that gap.

Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. 2 more questions for you. And on a personal note, are there brands or companies or causes that you follow or you think people I mean, Dave. I set you up for that one, didn't I?

Yeah, you do. I think we're on a really interesting journey over the next year or two. And I think as a company, we're certainly going on a really interesting— our product is something that helps people, particularly in a world with high inflation and high employment. Right. We're closing that gap between your ability to pay for things and your ability to sort of— your own liquidity. So I think, look at Dave, and hopefully we'll get on your radar at some point in the next sort of 3 to 6 months. But I think that for me, I find that I'm most excited by the brands that are trying to push around new platforms and understand new platforms. And I think in the fintech space, Truebill is a great company that really sort of tries to learn how to grow and how to— I think their marketing is amazing. And I think there's a lot of other companies that are sort of pushing into there that sort of really try and confront these new platforms and leverage these new platforms. So I've always been like Cash App to me, obviously a lot of these are fintech, but with influencer marketing in particular, taking that on and really trying to understand it from a financial services perspective. I think I'm fascinated by companies that learn things first and get the advantage from that. It comes back, I think, to understanding from the inside how important that unlock can be. So I think that's great. I think Julian goes on a great job on TikTok. I think TikTok is very passé to say this, but I think everyone should be spending as much of their time trying to figure out TikTok as possible. It's such a huge— it's at that point, right, where it's still a little bit of the Wild West, which means there's still the opportunity to arbitrage it. And I don't feel like it's yet to really get the investment from the big brands and all that stuff. So I think anyone that's I think Duolingo has done a great job of that. So yeah, those are some of the companies I look at and I sort of admire.

Awesome. And last question for you, what do you think is the largest opportunity or threat facing marketers today?

The biggest opportunity is the biggest threat, right? Which is all the changes that we've seen with user-level tracking for me. And again, I come from performance marketing, like I'm at a company that I think would consider itself to be primarily performance marketing based. But as part of that, this move from art to science to some blend of the two, I think I remember asking a couple of people when I first joined Credit Karma if we would ever invest in something we couldn't prove a return on. And I think the answer there was probably not, but didn't quite get a clear answer on that front. And I think that historically, probably the last 5 to 10 years have been characterized by that, where a lot of investment has gone to channels where you can most cleanly prove the return. And I think in that scenario, you are always capturing the lowest amount of impact that you're driving, right? If you're only looking at what you can prove, then you ignore all of the other upside of the stuff, of the impact that you can't prove. And that's fine. That has been enough in a market where you've been able to prove quite a lot. And I think that's why a lot of money has been going to— historically has obviously gone to channels where it's easier to track. But that's going away. And I think we see that all over the place right now where there's opportunities that have emerged with platforms that are harder to track, even traditional platforms or devices, or where the harder it is to track, the more opportunity there is for there. And I think that that comes back to the ability to think a little bit more thoughtfully about like measurement and tracking and proving out an ROI and not just being like at 100% sort of attached to kind of, you know, ad platform data or, or, or click-level data is, is going to be a huge unlock because, you know, you're— there's a lot of opportunity out there if you can, if you can just sort of zoom out a little bit and think about things in a way that's data-informed but not data-driven. And so I I think that, that, that's a big opportunity and it's also a big threat, I think, for a lot of companies that are kind of like looking at this in terms of that old way, what I already consider to be kind of an old school mindset, which is what can I prove? That's gonna get harder and harder.

Well, Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a lot of fun. All right.

I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Hi, it's Alan again. Marketing Today was created and produced by me. With support from my team and podcast editors, sound engineers, and writers at Share Your Genius. Find them at shareyourgenius.com. If you're new to Marketing Today, please feel free to write us a review on iTunes or your favorite listening platform. Don't forget to subscribe on marketingtodaypodcast.com and tell your friends and colleagues about the show. I love to hear from listeners. You can contact me on marketingtodaypodcast.com. There you will also find complete show notes, links to what was discussed in the episode today, and you can search our archives. I'm Alan Hart, and this is Marketing Today.