The fourth quarter is starting to pick up in what has been a fairly anemic year for local advertising agencies. Local executives say they’ve seen more requests for proposals and received more phone calls in the past two months than in the previous three quarters combined.
The trend holds true particularly with regards to small and medium-sized accounts, suggesting that perhaps the economic recovery we keep hearing about now is happening.
Curiously, a sizable portion of the recent activity has come from local financial institutions that have either switched agencies or are looking at doing so, including New Orleans-based Fidelity Homestead Savings Bank, Citizens Bank and Trust, Dow Louisiana Federal Credit Union and American Gateway Bank.
Is it merely coincidental or are local banks looking to reposition themselves in the post-bank-bailout era? Perhaps it’s a little bit of both.
Citizens Bank and Trust’s decision to leave its agency of 17 years for Dianne Allen and Associates had little to do with market conditions, according to Citizens Vice President Bill Blackwood. Rather, the 95-year-old community bank was interested in launching a fresh campaign to coincide with the opening of its Perkins Rowe branch early next year.
“Our relationship was getting a little stale, and it just seemed like a good time to make the transition,” Blackwood says. “It really didn’t have anything to do with anything going on in the banking industry.”
Fidelity Homestead’s decision to leave Graham Group after six years and award the advertising side of the account to Zehnder Communications was based on a couple of considerations.
One concerns logistics: Zehnder is based in New Orleans but has a large Baton Rouge office, and its top executives also live here. Similarly, Robyn Lott, Fidelity Homestead’s vice president of marketing, also lives in Baton Rouge, though her home office is in New Orleans.
Besides practical considerations, Fidelity Homestead wanted to make sure it had the very best agency representing it as it identifies “who we are and who we want to be,” Lott says.
The PR side of Fidelity Homestead’s account remains up for grabs; Zehnder also is one of the finalists for that portion of the business, which will be awarded in the next few weeks.
Unlike Citizens and Fidelity Homestead, Dow Louisiana’s recent decision to hire an ad agency to do the creative and media work it has heretofore done in house is in response to changes in the banking industry. It has hired Innovative Advertising of Mandeville to design and launch a six-figure, mass-media campaign that is designed to help the credit union make inroads in the retail market.
Allison Rogers, Dow Louisiana’s vice president of marketing, promises the campaign, which rolls out next month, will be a noticeable departure from the traditional financial institution-type of campaign with the old “handshaking in the lobby.” In the wake of the banking crisis a couple of years ago, she says, credit unions have an opportunity to pick up business from disgruntled or disillusioned banking customers.
“There’s a huge opportunity for credit unions as a whole because we’re nonprofit and are member-owned institutions,” Rogers says. “With all the fiascos in the banking industry, it has really given credit unions a leg to stand on.”
American Gateway Bank also sees a lot of opportunity for community institutions, like itself, to capture a larger share of the retail market. The Port Allen-based bank currently has its account up for review, and it’s expected to decide which agency lands the account in the next few weeks.
David Day, whose Day Group has had the account for the past three years and is one of the finalists in the current review, says the bank is launching a new brand campaign and is doing the prudent thing by evaluating where it is with respect to advertising and marketing.
Day says credit unions and community banks have a great opportunity to take what might have once been perceived as a weakness—their small size—and play it up as a strength.
“A lot of the local banks and credit unions didn’t take bailout money,” he says, “and they can say, ‘Look, we make our decisions locally based on the local economy.’”
