22 Years In Bank Marketing, Two Direct Bank Launches, And a Case For Tracking The Squishy Metrics.
On this episode of Bound by Banking we had the pleasure to sit down with John Hanley. The EVP and Chief Experience Officer at Idaho First Bank in Boise, where he also oversees Peak Bank, the institution’s online-only deposit brand. He spent 12 years before that as CMO at Equity Bank in Wichita for a total of twenty-two years in bank marketing. And now he teaches it to other bankers as a mentor at the ABA’s Bank Marketing School.
AI’s Real Value Isn’t the Creative, So Think Bigger
We opened with and AI question. Since John teaches a session on it at the ABA we really wanted to get his thoughts on things.
When it came to AI, most of the early excitement in bank marketing went toward production generating ad variations faster, shortening the creative life cycle, and getting more assets to market. John argues the bigger unlock has been on the research and analytics side, and the reason is specific to our industry. He’s hired marketers out of SaaS, manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods who arrived fluent in marketing but not in banking.
Understanding what a CFO actually cares about, how a campaign moves the balance sheet, why one product’s ROI profile looks nothing like another’s. That used to take years of absorbing it in meetings, but AI compresses that timeline now. A younger marketer can leave an executive meeting, test the assumptions they didn’t quite follow, and come back with a real point of view on deposit price elasticity, competitive rate positioning, the questions behind the questions.
John makes the same pitch to commercial lenders, not just marketers. His caution is that creative is where AI can do damage. “My worry with AI is cheapening of creative,” he told us that you can usually tell which brands rushed into content generation without keeping a human in the loop.
The Growth Lever Most Banks Are Leaving on The Table
We asked what banks are overlooking and to our surprise, John didn’t name a channel. He named something else entirely.
The industry has spent years chasing precision. Get the right product, in front of the right person, at the right moment. John’s issue is what it does to your addressable market. Every product-level qualifier you add shrinks the pool, until you’re targeting a slice so specific it’s smaller than the decision the customer is actually making.
His alternative is to build the bank as a place where people solve problems rather than a catalog of products. Trust and emotion drive banking decisions more than feature comparisons do. Lead with the problem and the product follows; lead with the product and you may never get the chance.
That thinking has shifted his media mix, too. He hasn’t abandoned digital, but at Idaho First Bank, He’s paired a lighter search and social presence with terrestrial TV and radio and has produced better response, including in-branch traffic.
It runs against the standard conference advice to pour 80% of budget into paid search, but it’s working for IFB so he’s going to keep it going.
What Actually Grew Peak Bank
Peak Bank has gathered roughly half a billion dollars in deposits in about two years without a single branch. We wanted to know which channel deserved the credit.
The answer he told us – Affiliate. Although the reason is more interesting than the channel. Changing the mix of affiliate partners did more than open accounts; it lifted the entire search marketing program. John describes affiliate as the tent pole everything else feeds back into. And increasingly that includes AI visibility: when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude where to park their savings, the brands that surface are the ones present across the publishers those models have indexed.
He’s careful not to make direct banking sound easy. Before a bank builds one, he wants to know whether it genuinely needs the deposits, whether there’s a plan to deploy them, and whether it’s one origination tool among several rather than the whole strategy. There’s a spending floor, too; a slick branded website with a small budget behind it doesn’t get found.
The most counterintuitive lesson has been geography, now at two different banks. Everyone builds a direct bank assuming they’ll compete for deposits in cheaper markets than the ones they’re already in. The funnels keep landing somewhere else: large metros, where customers have been saturated with big-bank competitors for years and a community bank is hard to find nearby.
How to Track Return On Emotion
This was the phrase of John’s we came across in our research, and it’s the one we keep thinking about.
A marketing leader has two jobs and they don’t always cooperate. One is to defend the numbers. The other is to defend the brand and the customer. And that second job rarely produces a clean ROI figure. So how do you measure it?
The important signals often show up as engagement and sentiment, or what John cheerfully calls the squishy metrics, a term he picked up and never let go of. His advice is to capture them anyway, even knowing your CFO may not love it. A connected TV campaign that doesn’t drive checking applications isn’t automatically a failure if branded search, long-tail terms, and site traffic all moved. For community banks fighting upward against national competitors, that lift is the top of a funnel that takes longer than 60 days to fill.
He also made a point a lot of banks skip: the account opening isn’t the finish line. Did the customer fund past a token balance in the first 30 days? Did they call, chat, or email? Those early behaviors say more about campaign quality than the acquisition number does and sometimes they reveal it brought in the wrong people entirely.
What Changes When the Branches Go Away
Our last question was about unlearning. What’s different running a digital-only brand after years inside a multi-branch bank.
John answered with a campaign he’s still fond of: a giveaway built around a supercharged toaster, which he calls the best lead generation campaign of his career. The leads were extraordinary. But almost nobody funded an account. It had leaned so far into novelty that it sat outside what people expect a bank to be, and once prospects got into the process, they backed out.
The lesson he took from it is relevance you can color outside the lines, but only so far, and standing out is worthless if you’ve misread what the customer came for.
The second thing he’s unlearned is the assumption that digital-only customers don’t want a relationship. They 100% do and they’re the most engaged base he’s worked with, constantly checking balances and managing funds. One of the most common compliments Peak heard was how quickly someone can reach an actual person, which says as much about the industry’s standard as it does about Peak.
Watch the full conversation
We covered a lot more than what fits in this recap. Watch the full episode of Bound by Banking with John Hanley for the rest.
