CardMarketing 2.0

Just a Sunday afternoon thought. As affiliate programs begin to play a more central role in companies' marketing strategies, could issuers commercialize their relationship with cardholders?

If you needed any proof that blogs are wielding tremendous power – and are even beginning to eclipse traditional media in certain sectors – then look no further than what unfolded a few days back...

Most of you have probably heard of Twitter, although there's a good chance you haven't got around to checking it out (it's on the radar, but not the priority list). For those of you who haven't heard of Twitter, it refers to itself as 'a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives'.

Bill Gates didn't hold back this week. Speaking to an audience of online advertisers at the company's Strategic Account Summit in Seattle on Tuesday, he painted a bleak picture of the future for traditional media. You can check out the webcast or written transcript yourself here, but the following snippets from the speech will give you a basic idea of what was said.

With the rise of YouTube and other user-generated video sites, more and more issuers and banks are seeing their products and ad campaigns spoofed by amateur filmmakers who then stick their creations on the internet for everyone to see....

I tapped the words 'world of warcraft credit card' into Google this morning. I wanted to see what other people were writing on this new card issued by Visa, Blizzard Entertainment and First National Bank Omaha. I was taken aback by the amount of coverage the damn thing had generated, the sheer excitement and chit chat in blogs and other online forums. Within a matter of days, coverage of the World of Warcraft (WoW) card has gone through the roof. It's everywhere, and everyone is talking about it. This is the essence of viral, of word of mouth (WoM).

Issuers are at war with the mass. Or at least, they should be. The phenomenal consumer thirst for personalization, as covered in the previous post, demands that issuers start targeting niches, micro-niches and every kind of affinity group — however big, however small. These days, cardholders want a product and service that's relevant to them and rewards them in a way that's relevant to their interests, not everybody else's. Even when their interests include, well, blood elves.... Blood elves? Huh?

Google is going to town on personalization. On 1 May it announced that its personalizable homepage, the company's fastest growing product in 2006, would henceforth be known as iGoogle. Meanwhile, the world's largest search engine is adding new gadgets (the things you personalize your site with, e.g. calendars, weather forecasts, space invader games, To-Do lists, Notebooks, news feeds, Quotes of the Day and mini Wikipedias, etc) at a rate of knots.

In the previous post I looked at how issuers need to build a web presence, or make their websites and cards more 'findable'. It's important they do: the internet has metamorphosed into a giant global haystack and every issuer's website, somewhere inside, small and generally out of sight, a tiny little needle.