CREATING THE ALLY FINANCIAL BRAND
Integrated global branding project.
My roles:
Brand strategy / identity design / brand launch creative concept content (copywriting for tv, digital, press, platform) and product innovation.
We were tasked with rebranding and relaunching GMAC – one of the banks at the center of global financial collapse of 2010.
GMAC was being led by a newly installed CEO to help reinvent the ‘too big to fail’ company.
Backed by an entirely new leadership team, we believed it could indeed be possible to create a new banking brand out of the ashes of GMAC - one that would champion the consumer's best interest through unprecedented transparency and consumer-first products and services.
We dove into the task of creating this new bank brand from the ground up.
This integrated campaign to launch the bank's online retail services led to over $32 Billion in initial deposits within the first 2 years.
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Working through BBH NY and Digitas, my concept led the winning pitch and played a key role in the creation of all Ally Financial branding elements and communications.
This included strategy, identity and logo development as well as the concepts and writing for all of the television, print, online and experiential launch campaign.
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BRAND LAUNCH COMMERCIALS:
We helped develop the online platform – including naming, logo, mark, assets and tone – that would eventually go on to re-brand the company and build their online retail services from scratch.
We also innovated products that would become the bank division’s online tools and features, all built around the concept of straightforward interaction with consumers and doing the right thing.
“Tim [and creative partner, Caprice Yu] invented for GMAC a brilliant creative idea that genuinely altered the trajectory of a company caught up not only in the recession’s devastating impact on the auto industry but also the 2008-2010
Wall Street crisis. He successfully rebranded a bank struggling for its very life and repositioned it with a personality and business philosophy exactly and unexpectedly right for turbulent times.”
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RETAIL + SUSTAINING
brand's positioning as a 'straightforward' banking experience would only be effective if the bank lived up to it and actually developed on it through their product offerings and policies as well as the communications.
We designed sustaining print and digital executions to provide tools and information that would educate consumers and enable them to make better banking decisions.
We also developed product concepts and solutions for the financial products and services Ally offered.
Our team was given license to influence everything from account service features and offers, to internal corporate policies – essentially 'baking' the concept into every touchpoint of the brand.
Initial comps:
Bank bailout protest, December 2008 | my own photo, and I agree.
Our integrated marketing effort successfully transformed GMAC into the Ally brand during the
second-largest financial crisis in US history.
Ally is now one of the world’s largest online banks, and Ally Financial has a market cap of 10.6 Billion.
As of 2018, Ally was ranked 19th on the list of largest banks in the United States by assets and the largest car finance company in the U.S. by volume.
After years of success, the bank’s restructuring and launch campaign ruffled a few too many feathers in the banking world and Mr. Molina was eventually pushed out and replaced as CEO.
I still share his initial vision, that all companies should be run with transparency first, and should serve people with a fair and straightforward approach.
It’s just the right thing to do
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