As FCS Charlotte prepares for its upcoming June luncheon on Bank Innovation vs. Fintech, let's revisit the March 19th luncheon staged by our southern chapter on "Marketing Personalization."

Jeff Turner, the Head of The Washington Post’s Advertising Research, Experimentation, and Development ("RED") team, delivered a keynote focused on the various ways publishers and AdTech companies are thinking about personalization in light of proposed data privacy legislation changes. Jeff believes that proposed laws, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, and technical anti-track advancements, such as recent efforts made by Apple, pose a serious threat to cookie-based targeting and retargeting advertising capabilities. To solve this challenge, many AdTech companies, including The Post, are investing more in machine-learned and AI-powered contextual advertising. The Post tested this type of advertising in its UX Lab, and found that core readers and subscribers prefer contextual advertising (73% like contextual targeting) over traditional cookie retargeting (66% dislike or strongly dislike traditional retargeting).  As a result, The Post is doubling-down on its machine-learned contextual efforts, releasing new products and features that will help allow advertisers to better leverage this technology at scale.”

Jeff then moderated a panel discussion on what these changes to personalization meant to bank marketers. Our panelists included:

• Kevin Howard, Senior Director, Digital Marketing, Ally Financial
• Gibran Saleh, SVP Customer Engagement and Investments, Bank of America
• Cynthia Jon-Ubabuco, Senior Counsel, Wells Fargo

The event was sponsored by an array of old and new friends of the FCS, whose support is greatly appreciated as our Charlotte continues to grow.

Thanks to our Partner sponsors mParticle and The Washington Post; Bronze sponsor Quartz; dessert sponsor, Marketo; and Deborah Bosley of The Plain Language Group, who sponsored two raffle prizes.