IIn our spring issue of this magazine, I mentioned that ICBA had launched their national “BankLocally.org” marketing campaign to educate the American public on the benefits of community banking and why their choice of bank matters. The timing of that launch could not have been more perfect given what was going on in the banking world with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and, later, First Republic Bank. I also mentioned that Jim Brown and I had connected with ICBA’s VP of Marketing, Rob Birgfeld, to start the conversation on how the MIB could coordinate with their national campaign with a slight change to rebrand it as “BankLocallyMontana.org” for our organization to bring focus to our MIB member banks. The following is an update on this endeavor. From the moment we started talking with Rob Birgfeld at ICBA about our idea, he fully supported it and was very enthusiastic about a state association picking it up and running with it at the state level. Jim and I invited Carol Blodgett with Blodgett Marketing, who had helped us run our previous digital marketing campaign, to join conversations on how to get the best bang for our marketing dollar. We quickly focused on a series of 15- and 30-second video ads that ICBA had created, as they were, by all accounts, very well done. The problem was that, due to production and talent rights, the video couldn’t be changed to add our “BankLocallyMontana.org” spin on it. However, with Rob seeing that this could be something all state associations may potentially want to do, he committed to working on the production and talent rights to allow us to use it. With some considerable effort on Rob’s part, he was able to secure the right for MIB to use one of the videos known as “The Tube.” The downside is that everything costs money, and it was going to take some to get these rights extended. When Rob let us know this, he mentioned that ICBA was willing to absorb the additional cost if we, as an organization, were willing to share the market data from our state-level campaign. In addition, PUTTING A SPOTLIGHT ON COMMUNITY BANKS TIM SCHREIBER, PRESIDENT PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE 6 Community Banker
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTg3NDExNQ==