Bridget Sponsky on building a banking brand that’s Ally by name and an ally by nature

I always had an affinity for writing. I would write all the time growing up. I took some college prep classes in high school for advertising and fell in love with it. My mom was an artist. My dad worked on the finance side of the auto industry. I consider myself in the middle ground – the balance of art and science – and I felt like advertising was this really unique industry that allowed me to bridge both disciplines.

I’m Detroit-based and I’m a Detroit native. I went to Michigan State University, which has one of the best advertising and communication colleges in the country, and I studied advertising there.

The curriculum then was mostly geared toward the creative side of the business, and that’s kind of where I was leaning. I wanted to be a writer, and I tried my hand at that out of college, but I didn’t have a lot of success. They say that you may want to pick your path, but sometimes your path picks you – and it all worked out.

I found myself working in the account side of the advertising business. I began my career at Young and Rubicam. As this is Detroit, we are the home of the US automotive industry. So when I started in the industry, I worked on a lot of the automotive brands from Lincoln and Mercury to Chevrolet.

I wanted to expand my skillset so I took a job where I could learn into CRM and understand the customer relationship side of the business: retention and brand loyalty. Ultimately I returned to the account side of the business at Campbell-Ewald

It was there that I found the opportunity to get into multi-platform initiatives. The group was called ‘entertainment marketing’ and I raised my hand to do a stretch project. We had a partnership with the Country Music Association and with Rolling Stone. Chevrolet did a lot of sports marketing and I was quick to determine that this was my strength.

I already knew that I didn’t just want to do one thing, whether that was advertising or events. I want to do everything. I loved the ecosystem of multi-platform sponsorship marketing.

I immersed myself in the business to absorb whatever I could to learn. And then a few years later, I got this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to rebrand a 100-year-old company. At the time the company was known as the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) and they wanted to evolve the business into an all-digital bank.

I realized that I may never have this kind of chance again. I had to trust my gut. It was 2008: there was an economic recession and establishments were crumbling before our eyes – but I took a leap of faith. I went over to GMAC and was part of the core team that rebranded the company from GMAC to Ally and 16 years later, here we are.

When I joined, we needed to define a whole new vision of what this company was going to be, from the value proposition to the culture of the company. As I look back over 16 years, it’s almost unbelievable to me to see what we have accomplished. We’ve changed the face of banking.

Bridget Sponsky at the Sports and Culture Summit

For those who may not have encountered Ally, as we’ve got an audience on both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps you could explain more about this transformation?

We are one of the first US-based all-digital banks. We were born the year that the Apple iPhone was released. We took a huge bet that everybody at some point in the future would be doing everything from their phone. And when we launched, it was the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. It was a time when everybody was very emotional about banking.

We recognized that the world didn’t need another bank, they just needed a better bank. The entire value proposition was born out of purpose – solving for customer pain points: literally naming everything that we despised about banking and then vowing that we would never do those things.

That business and value proposition is really what drove the success of our brand and vice versa. We’ve become this disruptive force in the banking category, and I think our brand is reflective of that.

As a financial services company we have the remit to positively affect the trajectory of people’s financial lives. We’ve taken a disruptive, approach in business by doing things that others in the category haven’t really ever even thought of. We consistently put our customer first – our customers are at the center of everything. From being the first big bank to eliminate overdraft fees to our 50/50 media equity commitment in sports. Over time this has led to us being recognized as a disruptive and positive force in banking.

Your net revenue is in the billions. You have 11 million customers. And then there are all the awards. According to Fortune, Ally is one of America’s most innovative companies in 2024. The brand has also won at the Smart Money Awards and in Newsweek’s ‘Best financial apps and services of 2023’...

It’s pretty humbling to see the recognition for the Ally brand.

I think you see such an impressive list of awards that we’ve won because “Do it right” truly is our mantra.

The Ally ‘savings bucket’ prominently featured in the 2024 Super Bowl campign

I watched your ‘Monumentally’ and ‘Let's keep growing’ campaigns. I love the savings bucket commercial. Could you talk us through the insights perhaps that led to your decision to run with the bucket commercial?

A pivotal point for us was when we launched our ‘Do it right’ campaign. We created a vision of a unified go-to-market strategy and centralized all of our marketing efforts. When we launched Do it right, it was more than a campaign. It was also an important movement for our employee base and for our culture.

Everybody in the company has really rallied around these words, and we strive to live up to them every day.

Everyone knows what ‘do it right’ means, and it’s just become our expression and our approach to everything, not just marketing. We like to say do it right translates to ‘deeds over words.’ So instead of talking about what we want to do, we actually do it.

We make really big commitments, and I think we elicit a lot of bravery. Our actions are not something customers or consumers of banking products necessarily expect from their bank, but it’s what helps us disrupt the category and helps to change the game for banking as a whole.

As a digital bank, we don’t have any physical branches. We don’t have a tangible product that you can hold in your hand. Our challenge has always been to bring Ally to life, show its human side and integrate Ally into all aspects of what we call ‘money moments.’

Life costs money. In every money moment that you have, you know that you have ‘an ally’ there to help. We are a relentless ally for our customers.

What we call our “Totally” campaign uses real a-l-l-y words that describe those moments in life that are centered around money, reminding consumers that there’s literally an ally there for them in all of those moments.

The campaign’s hero images, with the a-l-l-y words, are beautiful demonstrations of those money moments, and those moments we captured have been re-shared on social media into a form of collectables. It’s been a really successful campaign for us.

Ally’s savings buckets is one of our differentiating tools. It’s a way for our customers to be able to visually see how their savings are stacking up to their personal savings goals.

Through this particular spot, we were able to use real examples of what people are saving for – whether it be a car, vacation, retirement or a home. It was a way to resonate with consumers and help them understand that it takes an ally to help them achieve their savings goals.

The savings bucket spot was really created to break through a lot of the big game clutter. We decided that our ‘way in’ was to sort of tap into the idea that while all the other advertisers during the big game were trying to get you to spend your money we would go the other way and show that we’re here to help you save it and to spend it on something meaningful: a real live money moment.

Ally’s mission to change the game for women’s sports, and give athletes the platform, investment, and respect they command has included sponsorship of women’s sports in the US

Tell me all about Ally’s association with the National Women’s Soccer League?

Historically women’s sports were seen as ‘added value’, which placed them in this vicious cycle that has created the inequity we’ve seen. Brands weren’t investing in women’s sports media or in sponsorships and as a result, media channels would not cover women’s sports and vice versa.

This manifested itself in poor time slots on broadcast schedules, lower pay for the players and less value for the leagues. Someone had to blink to break the cycle, and that’s what we’ve done.

We’re a sponsor of the National Women’s Soccer League. We signed on to sponsor the league in 2021. We understood the trends in women’s sports. It wasn’t just the data points: yes, soccer was the fastest growing sport in the US, but we also had fundamental belief in women's sports. We knew that women’s sports had the same potential as men’s sports.

It was a combination of data and fundamental belief. When we invested in the NWSL, it put us on a trajectory to be an architect of the movement in women’s sports here in the United States. Through that partnership, we’ve been able to make a lot of really groundbreaking moves.

We worked with CBS, a national broadcast media partner here in the US to move the NWSL championship match to prime time. That was in 2022 and it was the first time that a women’s professional sports championship match or game was ever played in prime time. That was monumental.

We also made a pledge in 2022 to commit equal media investment to men’s and women’s sports. We call it our 50/50 pledge. We made a commitment that by the end of 2027, for every dollar that we spend in men’s sports media, we will spend the same amount in women’s sports media.

Choosing five years was deliberate and purposeful. We knew that we couldn’t do it alone, but we also knew that we needed to make sure that there was inventory for us to buy. We had to push the market to be able to create that inventory so that other brands could invest alongside us.

Having taken that step and recognizing how ‘out of whack’ our investment in men’s and women’s sports was, now, nearly three years into our pledge, we’ve increased our spend in women’s sports 400%.

It’s been an incredible journey for us, and we’ve seen double-digit growth in a lot of our brand health metrics. We’ve seen favorability grow. We’ve seen increase in our brand value – the largest increase in the brand value in the financial services industry this year, which is huge. So we know it’s working.

There has been record-breaking viewership for the Women’s College Basketball March Madness season. Record-breaking viewership in the WNBA, and we’re seeing brands come to the table and make substantive investments.

We’re proud be to helping to drive this change around women’s sports. At some point in the future , we’ll be talking about ‘sports’ instead of ‘men’s sports’ and ‘women’s sports.’

The Ally ‘Totally’ campaign has built out a series of campaigns using the bank’s name

How is your marketing team structured?

We’re led by our chief marketing and PR officer, but we really see our organization as a set of teammates with different strengths and talent – possibly because a lot of us are former athletes.

Depending on the challenge or the initiative, we align with the right players for the project team. My sponsorship team is comprised of a set of teammates who bring different perspectives and experience.

I have a specific team that leads our women’s sports initiatives, comprised of a diverse mix of women who are former athletes, or who have worked on the league or team side and also who have worked on the agency side. They really understand the landscape, the athlete perspective and the business of sports marketing, and it helps us to be able to continue to create really defining moments in the trajectory of women’s sports. That mentality really is applied across the board – whatever the objective or goal that we might be facing.

What’s your approach to balancing long-term brand building versus shorter-term performance marketing?

This is where a ‘north star’ is so important because it helps you make those balanced decisions. Once you’ve set a clear goal, then it comes down to prioritization. We anticipate based on a lot of factors including trends, not just in the banking category, but cultural trends too.

You have to figure out where to take the big bet sometimes: the return may not happen short term, but over the long term, your actions could provide exponential returns. We’ve seen that in a lot of our big brand activities. Our association with women’s sports is a great example of that.

In a sea of technology, data and AI, marketing solutions and platforms, how do you make the right technology decisions?

It is ‘customer first’. Ultimately what’s going to be the most valuable investment for the customer. I think technology comes in so many different forms. We might be investing in a test/learn agenda to understand how we can create an experience for an emerging audience, or we might be investing in technology internally but ultimately creates a better experience for the customer. I think that the gist of that is investing in technology responsibly.

I think there is a lot of risk to the unknown. Technology is innovation, and there’s a lot of unknown territory. But the guiding principle is being customer-centric: thinking about if this going to provide the most value for our customer?

What’s your view on the value of creativity in marketing?

I think creativity is the one thing in this business that’s totally invaluable. I think creativity comes in a lot of different forms. It’s not something that can easily be taught. Creativity is a talent. But it doesn’t always come in the traditional sense as we might define it with writing and art.

It’s about being really crafty at navigating different challenges, crowded spaces, fragmented spaces, like sponsorships and media. I think creativity is rooted in two things, curiosity and vision, and I think those two traits are necessary in this business, especially in a role like mine. Creativity is the one word that I put the most emphasis on when I look for talent.

What have you learned in your career that helps you get the best out of your marketing team?

I believe in deep connection. I am not a hierarchical leader, though I do understand its place. The more that you know your team as individuals, the stronger the bond, the better that you’re going to perform.

That’s what creates beautiful work – much like players and coaches. You've got those teams that have chemistry and the ability to play together and that are really leveraging each other’s strengths. They are the ones that win.

That’s the philosophy that I have with my team: I try to be as deeply connected as I possibly can be. I understand the strength of each player on that team and make sure that we’re forming the right relationships amongst each other, so that we’re producing the best product.

We do a lot of structured strength assessments, too. As an organization, we’ve mapped out what motivates our team members as individuals. Is it direct feedback? Is it affirmation? Is it recognition? Once we understand this, we know how to best work with each other on an individual basis. This approach has been a game-changer for our team over the years.

What advice you might give your younger self if you could go back in time, what might you encourage a younger you to do more of and what might you avoid?

I would say two things. First, I would tell myself that I don’t have to be good at everything and that I shouldn’t hide behind what I’m not good at. Instead, I should own my strengths and use them. Second: as an extension of that, I wish that I would have realised that my creativity really was a differentiator for me throughout my whole career.

I think if I had recognized that earlier in my career I would have embraced that more. So focus on your strengths, own them and use them.

If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is?

One of our agency partners actually said: ‘You can't talk yourself out of what you behave yourself into.’ If your words don’t reflect your actions, then your customers will see through you.

Marketing has the ability to do so much more than sell products. It has the power to impact positive change in the world. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this with brands. To drive forward positive change, CMOs and brand leaders need to be brave. We talk about creativity being a key trait, but bravery is going to be a key trait that marketing leaders will need to possess.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Little Grey Cells is Tim Healey, founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet up.