046 Tina Cleary
Chief Marketing Officer, AMP
Tina Cleary is Chief Marketing Officer at AMP, a retail wealth management and banking business with 1.5 million customers across Australia and New Zealand. Her experience spans North America, the UK, and Europe with stints at OFX and Euronet.
“It’s not for the faint-hearted, but boy do I love it!”
The interview
What’s your coffee ritual?
I always seem to be on the run, so I’m an avid Hey You App user, loyal to Barrel One Coffee Roasters in Manly or the little local coffee shop my daughter works at, grabbing my skinny flat white extra hot so I can enjoy every last drop!
What was your first marketing job?
Marketing my car wash and baby sitting services, delivering flyers door to door! My first paid marketing gig was at Sony BMG, doing direct and digital marketing for an impressive roster of boy bands. I was working in an industry where marketing measurement is there to see in the charts each and every week, sharing an office with none other than Simon Cowell.
What’s an underrated growth channel in fintech?
Email and push notifications.
What keeps you up at night?
Marketing performance and ROI, talent and team dynamics, and how to ensure we stay ahead and innovate - I often have ideas in the night, not always good ones!
What are the most useful measurement tools you use in your work?
Tracking investment and marketing performance, from basic correlation analysis to media mix modelling. Also anything that measures a customer’s perspective, perception, satisfaction and of course journey through our products / service experience - in particular a great product analytics tool - currently we use Adobe Analytics, but also a fan of tools like Amplitude.
What’s one fintech brand (other than your own) that’s getting marketing right?
I think what’s common about many fintechs out there that I love is that the new kids on the block are showing up really clear on who they are going after, and wholly focussed on solving a very specific problem for a very specific audience. To me that is great marketing, AND they seem to commit to something and keep at it over and over again - consistency wins! What I also love about these (too many to mention) B2B fintechs, they also seem to have put aside the traditional constraints of ‘financial services marketing’ and are showing up in a much more distinct and appealing way, oftentimes this was reserved for B2C brands, having spent a lot of time at events like Money 2020 globally, the standard of branding and marketing in this space has improved dramatically and it’s great to see.
Why is marketing so hard?
The myth that marketing is just advertising and everyone has an opinion that we should be doing X, Y, or Z. We know marketing is a far broader and more complex expertise. Marketing requires a broad skillset, combining art / creativity, science (data and behavioural science), operations, tech and digital capability, and match that with a fast evolving marketing technology backdrop, AI, economic climate, pressure to drive performance and justify ROI, whilst building investment cases for the future. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but boy do I love it!