June 18, 2014

Q&A: Alan Walsh, Global Marketing Director, American Express, ATM Team

Alan Walsh, Global Marketing Director at American Express’s ATM Commercial Team, will be among the keynote speakers at the Figaro Digital Marketing Conference in London on 17 July. We caught up with Alan for a preview of his presentation.

Hello Alan. Please give us a quick introduction to what you’ll be discussing at the Figaro Digital Marketing Conference.

‘Planning for Growth Through Location-based Information and Offers – The Global ATM Locator’ is the title. This is an enterprise-wide tool showing the location of the 1.2 million American Express-accepting ATMs worldwide. It’s a customer servicing tool which serves customers when they travel. It features enterprise use of a CMS and the tactics are designed to improve value.

Why are developments like this significant to marketers right now?

Time and convenience – people expect relevant data at their fingertips immediately, wherever they are. Using GPS, we know the card-member’s location and we can push an offer to them based on their location/time of day etc. Scalability and content reuse for a consistent experience are important.

We’re impatient! Can we have one key take-away from your presentation?

If you build it, they will come! Also, build once, for many. We built the platform and the infrastructure and proved they can work. Since showcasing it around the wider business it has generated lots of interest in how else it can be used. Changes and tweaks can be made relatively easily.

What’s the single biggest issue facing marketers in your sector at the moment?

Budget, which will always be the case. Showcasing a solid business case is hugely important and having buy-in from the right people is imperative in getting a project off the ground. Using the mantra ‘build once, for many’ helps strengthen the business case and confirm buy-in. Scalability is very important in our business so allowing for easy changes such as translation is important. You also need a mix of the correct expertise – business, marketing and technical. And you need to use those in an agile manner.

If we provided you with a magic wand that enabled you to make one change to the digital marketing landscape, what would it be?

More open sharing. There is so much information and data out there today. This will continue to grow, and if people can share best practices and even platforms or code, it helps keep costs down, strengthen the business case and appeal to customers’ needs. Google is a great example. Simply changing our maps from Bing to Google was widely received because it is so familiar and intuitive for people to use. If there is more sharing, and the digital landscape continues to focus on being more user-friendly and sharing best practices, that can only be a good thing.

Anything else you’d like to tell us?

Data is paramount – clean and accurate data. Throughout this project accurate data was always our number one priority. You can have the fanciest looking tool out there but if the data is wrong people won’t come back and use it again. That was one of our biggest issues, as we receive data from over 140 countries, in different languages, formats etc., so cleansing, standardising and geo-coding can be difficult.