023 Terry Seitz
VP, North America Marketing, Visa
Terry Seitz spent over a decade as Vice President, North America Marketing at Visa. Before that he had an agency-side stint in advertising and media as Vice President at Grey and PHD. He’s currently a board member and advisor for nonprofits via Lend a Hand. He’s also an NYU Stern School of Business MBA.
“Human behaviour is unassailably and beautifully illogical, irrational, and non-binary - but we’re trying to convince ourselves otherwise.”
The interview
What’s your coffee ritual?
Iced coffee (black, poured in a pint glass; two in total) made at home - it’s the very first thing I do / consume at 5am.
What was your first marketing job?
Mascot (a fox) for the New England Revolution (a Major League Soccer team in Boston).
What finance apps do you have on your home screen?
Chase and RBC (personal banking), Investment Calculator, Venmo (P2P), The Wall Street Journal (news), Square (POS), Coinbase (crypto), Stocks (iOS), Apple Wallet (digital wallet).
Which newsletter, podcast, or book do you recommend most?
Oh gosh, let me put forth a few pods: The Prof G Pod (Scott Galloway), GZERO World (Ian Bremmer), The Economist, Uncensored CMO (Jon Evans); and one transformative book: The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom.
What’s an underrated growth channel in fintech?
Brand (which may seem counterintuitive) but if we acknowledge the 95:5 Rule which posits that only 5% of a given segment is currently in market for one’s product or service, then brand should be used to prime the other 95%.
What keeps you up at night?
Other than my 7 and 10 year old kids? Getting my head around the amazing possibilities (and potential perils) of AI and its impact on marketing.
What are the most useful measurement tools you use in your work?
mROI, cross-media, and payment volume lift studies.
What’s one fintech brand (other than your own) that’s getting marketing right?
Cash App as they deftly use who and what is defining culture across sports, fashion, music, etc. to seed their products and generate brand preference.
Why is marketing so hard?
Beyond the proliferation of channels / platforms, we have over-rotated on trying to prove deterministic vs. probabilistic outcomes. Human behaviour is unassailably and beautifully illogical, irrational, and non-binary - but we’re trying to convince ourselves otherwise.