Current is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) FinTech brand that brings financial services to people working to create a better future for themselves. They see Roku as a must-have partner in that mission. Adam Hadi, VP of Marketing at Current, has built a marketing strategy that grows Current’s brand and drives performance marketing. Roku has been a part of their strategy, with the help of OneView and innovative new tools. We caught up with Adam to talk about his experience with Roku, the unlikely path to his role at Current, and the unique challenges and opportunities of performance marketing in the FinTech space.
Adam blazed an unconventional trail for himself, starting with a government job and finding his way to tech by way of digital trading cards. The common thread was his focus on data and performance and deep insights into how branding can be quantified.
I started my career at the Bureau of Labor Statistics as an economist. My undergrad degree was in economics, I got a master’s in it from Johns Hopkins University. So, I have a data-oriented background. My first job in tech was at a company called Topps (the American trading card company), where I helped launch the digital division for digital trading cards. This was a decade ago, so it was a lot crazier of a pitch back then than it would be today.
My job was to manage the virtual economy. But quite quickly, I pivoted into user acquisition and performance marketing.
Current is more than just an online bank. They’re a platform for onboarding people into financial systems. When Adam joined the team at Current, he found a nearly perfect fit for his values and ethos as a performance marketer. And it was a similar alignment of values and marketing principles that would ground their partnership with Roku.
Adam:
At Current, we are helping people build a better future for themselves financially. That may sound like a broad statement, but we have a broad goal. We're in the business of onboarding people into financial systems and democratizing access to those systems. So, what we are trying to do here is to take all the value that exists in the financial world, both old and new, and bring it to the masses. We’re bridging things like crypto and more traditional assets in a system that’s accessible to folks who might have been excluded in the past due to lack of resources or knowledge of the market.
The way I see it, Roku is effectively doing the same thing by taking this traditional platform of a TV screen and integrating it with new technologies and systems in an exciting way that’s a win-win for marketers and audiences.
Adam’s experience gave him a perspective that helped him see the interdependence of brand and performance marketing. Working from this understanding has been essential in light of the unique challenges of marketing financial services.
Adam:
The opposite of performance marketing is not brand marketing, but non-performing marketing, which is certainly not what you want. Brand and direct response marketing fit under the overall performance lens. No matter how you define your terms, you always have to ask, “what are the immediate goals of the advertisement?” and “what is it trying to drive?”
Thinking critically about labels for different aspects of marketing isn’t just a thought exercise. By reevaluating how we categorize marketing activities, we can start to reimagine how to use different channels in our media mix. That’s exactly what Adam did as he brought his influencer marketing and direct response (DR) experience to streaming.
Channels themselves don’t necessarily need to be defined as DR channels or brand channels. I think they can be leveraged for either. It’s more about your message, your measurement, and what it is that you’re trying to do. You can take a DR approach to TV, if you’d like, there is evidence that it works. At the same time, you can take a channel like Facebook and use it to promote brand goals, and you can do brand marketing on Facebook, even though it’s a channel that’s traditionally DR focused.
This connection between performance and brand is a necessity in an industry like FinTech. Money is extremely personal. At the end of the day, we're asking customers to trust us with all of their money. Someone who’s never heard of us is not going to do that. Why would they? And even if they have heard of us, we have to earn their trust. So the brand side of things has to be on point. We have to build our messaging into a bigger brand story that conveys the value we offer. As a medium, streaming TV provides a lot of validation, and that’s important. The medium itself comes with trust.
Again, how this plays out for a FinTech company presents some interesting opportunities. We are a banking app, which means that we have a ton of verified data. As a financial institution, we must go through a process called KYC (Know Your Customer). We verify our customers’ identities: how old they are, where they live, who they are, how they get paid, where they spend their money. So, we have this incredibly rich trove of data on our customer. So, if we are unable to be relevant to them, then who is? We can use that to really deliver a relevant experience through product and marketing. This kind of data enables deep partnership with other platforms like Roku, who also have rich customer data.
With TV streaming, Adam found a near perfect balance of reach and performance.
Adam:
I think TV as a platform is super interesting. First, simply in terms of reach. Increasingly we are dealing with a world that is more and more fragmented, and so reaching as many people as you can is the priority.
With streaming, the stats speak for themselves, especially when you look at how much this channel has grown over the last several years, and how much of people’s time is spent on streaming experiences. And specifically with Roku how big of a market share you have among all the various devices of where people stream. So, just from my first principles’ approach, it fundamentally makes sense for us to have a presence there and explore what we can do on the platform.
Part of what’s exciting about partnering with Roku for Adam is the opportunity to grow with an up-and-coming platform. As he looks ahead to what’s next for Current, he’s keeping an eye on new ways to drive performance and branding.
Adam:
Where I see a strong compatibility between Current and Roku is the way we’re both about bridging worlds. For us, it’s about onboarding people into financial systems and helping them leverage digital tools to build financial wellbeing. Some of that is about giving them access to traditional financial products that haven’t always been accessible to everyone. But we don’t want to stop there, that’s why we’re bridging that old world with the new and bringing new currencies into the mix.
I look at Roku and I see a similar bridge-building going on where you have connected the “old world” of TV advertising with the latest digital marketing tools on a platform that empowers advertisers to reach a mass audience while scaling individual connection at the same time.
You don’t get that same excitement and sense of possibility with every channel.
Current is building the future of banking. Follow along and stay connected:
Subscribe to our newsletter to learn more about Roku Advertising.