Zelle Arms a New Ad Campaign
The huge first-mover advantage currently held by Venmo, who for a while there pretty much was the entire peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payments concept, is a catastrophe for newcomers to the market. Now, a new marketing push from Zelle is looking to try and pry some of that market ground out from under Venmo.
The new marketing push isn’t just to give Zelle a leg up in the field, reports note; it’s also looking to get more users interested in P2P payments in general. The word is that this is a marketing push poised to rank in the “double-digit multi-million dollar” range, according to Early Warning chief administrative officer Rose Corvo. Since Early Warning runs the Zelle network, she’d be well-placed to know.
This marketing seems largely focused on online sources, with targets including BuzzFeed, Facebook, Hulu, Snapchat and Twitter, which makes sense given the target market. Zelle’s likely also got a point in expanding its overall reach; just 15 percent of customers in an Aite Group study were using P2P payments, and just over twice that—35 percent—turned to mobile banking at all.
In a somewhat more bizarre move, the marketing developed with the Huge ad agency will focus mainly on ear worms in rhyming couplets to get the job done. One such phrase planned is “Your friend has a different bank, no sweat! Zelle makes it easier to pay your debt.”
Somehow, I can’t help but think that trying to target millennials with cringe-worthy rhyming couplets on online and mobile venues is a terrible idea. First, it’s not likely to budge current Venmo users out of established patterns. No one’s going to look at their mobile devices and say “Golly, I remember the happy little jingle on BuzzFeed, so I should start using Zelle!” It’s also not super likely to get new users interested. More likely, someone will just grumble at the fact that “Take your intern to lunch; he’ll thank you a bunch!” is stuck in his or her head.
If Zelle wants to draw customers, it needs to focus on features and benefits. What can it do that Venmo—a more established name in the field—can’t or won’t? If it focused more on answering that and less on chirpy jingles, it might have a better chance.