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At Cardlytics, the trusted relationships that we have built with financial institutions are part of what makes us unique. And, we’re proud to announce our new partnership with SunTrust.

In March 2017, we helped SunTrust launch their new SunTrust Deals program. Leveraging Cardlytics’ technology, SunTrust Deals provides customers with relevant cashback deals on the things they like to buy. The program is available to both credit and debit card users, both online and mobile. Since its kick-off in March, on average, nearly 80% of clients that visit the mobile application engaged with SunTrust Deals and activated a cashback offer.

Here’s an example of SunTrust Deals in action:

SunTrust is constantly thinking of innovative ways to elevate the consumer experience, and their partnership with us for SunTrust Deals is just another example of their vision.

This partnership is also particularly unique given that SunTrust is headquartered just a few miles from Cardlytics’ Atlanta office. Atlanta is becoming a globally recognized FinTech hub, and our work with SunTrust further solidifies the position of both Atlanta and Cardlytics’ role in Atlanta’s FinTech landscape.

Learn more about the SunTrust Deals launch, here.

Football fans in the UK are known for being many things. They’re fiercely loyal, tribal, and passionate. Equally, they’re opinionated connoisseurs of ‘the beautiful game’.

They’re also one of the UK’s biggest consumer groups. And, while many of the group’s defining characteristics will remain for years to come, it’s their spending habits which our data suggests may well be changing.

English football has, over the years, become synonymous with certain things. Fans are expected to indulge in pies and pints. Fashion-wise, with a few exceptions, there wasn’t much room for flair.

But, times are changing. As the Premier League has grown to become one of the world’s leading football leagues, and TV money has flooded in, prices (and player salaries) have in kind risen significantly. While die-hard supporters remain, this has led to a clear shift in the spending make-up of football fans, as more affluent consumers join the category. Our research showed the extent to which this played out in terms of their spending. The findings were telling.

The best-performing fashion brands among football fans are high-end, with Hugo Boss, Paul Smith, and Ralph Lauren being some of the most popular brands. Restaurant-wise, the winners are urban and expensive. The likes of Hawksmoor and Gaucho fare well.

Our data also suggests that modern football fans are more than just spectators. Compared to the average consumer, they are four times more likely to purchase sports goods from brands like Pro-Direct and Under Armour and twice as likely to visit other sportswear stores, such as Adidas, New Balance, and American Golf.

Clearly, the modern-day football fan is changing. But more importantly, this is a timely reminder that audience categories develop and evolve with time, even the most established. So there are wider lessons for brands. As a marketer, you must stay on top of consumer spending habits to make sure you understand your target audience.

This means not only knowing your own customers, but knowing those of your rivals, and the category more broadly. The brands that don’t have these insights risk being left on the sidelines.

Every year, Cardlytics hires a select class of interns to get hands-on work experience in our offices. And, this year was no exception, with six interns working across Analytics, People Operations, Implementations, Media Inventory Planning, and Accounting teams.

The Cardlytics internship program is not one filled with coffee runs and meaningless errands, but each intern is given the opportunity to work on actual projects within their teams. We also offer extra perks that give them tools for post-graduate success, including:

• Shadow Day: the opportunity to shadow an employee from a different department to explore what they do at the company and learn about a different role
• Resume Workshop: the recruiting team discusses the do’s and don’ts of resume writing and helped interns update their resumes and incorporate their new internship experience
• Recent Graduate Panel: interns met with a panel of Cardlytics employees that graduated within the past 2-3 years to learn about their job search experience and receive tips and advice on how to approach the job search and interviews.

And, of course, each intern was able to get the full energetic experience that is being a Cardlytian, including unlimited access to snacks and afternoon yoga sessions!

See how this year’s intern class describes their experience at Cardlytics.

Want to join the fun next year? Be sure to apply for our next summer internship, here. Applications open February 2018.

With consumers feeling the pinch, UK spending levels have been going through a rough patch of late. The falling value of the pound has made imports more expensive, while the uncertainty caused by the Brexit vote has left shoppers less likely to spend money.

Our UK Spend Index lays this bare. Retail (-28%), fashion (-31%) and grocery (-10%) all saw significant quarterly falls at the start of this year.

But, looking at the bigger picture, overall spending remained steady, edging up 3% year-over-year. Our data shows that we have two areas to thank for this: eating out and holidays.

Eating out continues its relentless rise (the BBC has covered our data on this before, here). Though down slightly on the quarter, quick service restaurant (QSR) spending leapt by 18% year-over-year, while general restaurants were up 8%.

There were also signs of a Great British getaway. Airline spending saw an unprecedented spike as Brits rushed to book holidays (58% year-over-year, 8% on the quarter). There were suggestions of an increase in domestic breaks too, with hotels up 9% year-over-year and 10% on the quarter, and petrol down 1% on the year, but up 14% quarterly.

While brands will need to work hard across the board to attract new customers and keep existing ones, particularly with further uncertainty in the UK ahead, some sectors are seeing a bit of relief.

We shared these insights with the top restaurant and travel trades. Check out the coverage in MCA and Travel Weekly.

Data protection has quickly grown from being a buzz-word to a concern keeping board-level executives up at night.

As demonstrated by recent high-profile cyber attacks, the cost of a data breach now comes in all shapes and sizes – from significant financial repercussions to damaged reputation and loss of existing customers. Ensuring this is avoided while improving the customer experience is the real tightrope challenge.

Read more in this byline, which was featured on the IBS Intelligence Blog, and written by our UK Head of Bank Relationships, Campbell Shaw.

One of our retail clients presents two slides at every board meeting: the first shows all of their marketing initiatives that aren't measurable with ROI and the second shows all of the programs that are. He noted that his performance review is tied directly to the number of programs that he can move from the first slide to the second. Clearly, in an increasingly efficient and accountable economy, the old Wanamaker adage that ‘half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half’ is no longer acceptable.

So, how did we get here? And, how can we move toward deterministic measurement to ensure we are investing in channels, publishers, creatives, and placements that drive the highest return?

Art vs. Science

Twenty-five years ago, targeting and measurement were more art than science – with a considerable margin of error. We were doing the best we could with the data and analytics available, but it was challenging to find the right metrics and tools to demonstrate the impact of our marketing spend. Over time, more data sources flooded the market, presenting an overwhelming amount of options. Now we had a new challenge, sifting through the data sets to determine what had relevance.

Technologists stepped in with sophisticated, and fast, systems to help deliver data in more usable forms, and a shift in marketing began to take hold. Early loyalty and CRM systems launched. Many households got check cashing cards. Probabilistic mix models became the source of truth. Once a primarily creative process, targeting, and measurement now had a layer of science. Billions of operational dollars began flowing into data centers with the promise of precise targeting and measurement at scale. CFOs were no longer satisfied with measuring what might be true. They wanted certainty in the quantitative impact of their company’s marketing spend.

But, as marketers, we were challenged to provide this level of measurement. We have gained more insight for sure but getting to absolute measurement is still a challenge. New marketing technologies offer a more sophisticated view of consumer data with more robust analytics, but very few connect the data points in a way that provides us with accurate ROI. For example, geolocation helps us better understand brick-and-mortar sales by linking someone’s location with an assumed purchase. While driving foot traffic is an important part of marketing goals, it is still an ROI ‘guess’ at best. Online, clicks have long served as a proxy for consumer intent to buy, but causality remains a challenge, particularly offline. Both of these technologies got us closer to the end goal, but neither were truly deterministic.

The new currency is currency

Deterministic consumer spend data is becoming more readily available, allowing us to more precisely target consumers and, more importantly, measure campaign effectiveness. As an industry, we are at the early stages of integrating this insight into our digital marketing capabilities. The promise of CRM systems combined with bank transaction data provides us a full wallet picture of spend. This view provides the unique and exciting ability to target consumers and measure campaign effectiveness based on actual spend, not surveys, models, panels or proxies.

The path to deterministic targeting and measurement lies in integrating actual purchase data, with the ability to measure true incrementality. In many of the largest channels, we still measure campaign effectiveness with archaic metrics like effective CPMs, clicks, and ratings points, when we have the ability to measure effectiveness in what matters most to CFO’s…actual dollars.

This blog was adapted from a contributed piece I authored for MarTech Advisor. Visit http://bit.ly/1RLe5Zs to read the full article.

There is no correlation between a click and actual in-store or online spend. That is not a typo, it is a truth that we continue to see across all categories with few exceptions. Unfortunately, while as an industry we have become experts at driving efficient means to drive clicks, these clicks can’t be used to pay down overhead, invest in R&D or increase gross margin. Clicks are not a currency. Currency is a currency.

As marketers, we crave more deterministic methods to demonstrate that our marketing executions work (and, better understand how to fix them when they don't). We believed that clicks, as indicated by a consumer action, were a significant improvement versus the obvious limitations of measurement using circulation, placements, and estimated audiences. A click provided us a way to measure consumer action taken on ads across digital platforms. From these clicks, the first true pay-for-performance metric – cost-per-click or CPC – was born. But, CPC was deceptive. A click is only a proxy for consumer intent to buy, but it doesn’t tell us if a purchase is actually made.Related to CPC, we use ROAS (or Return on Ad Spend) as a way to measure the return of our online campaigns. But, ROAS has two key flaws:Attribution: Who gets the credit for the sale? Is it the last click? Do all clicks get a share? Should we divide sales among impressions and clicks? There are countless attribution companies to help marketers answer these questions, buttheystruggle to deliver a definitive answer.Online to Offline Impact: Since digital marketing is often linked to online sales, companies tend to group them together – that is, digital marketers are evaluated on online sales. But, 92 percent of sales happen in stores, so how do we understand the impact these digital campaigns have on offline sales?Digital marketing teams are held to the KPI of online sales because there are few alternative measures of effect and ROI. As a solution, I’d offer that there is a new currency for measurement: currency.Working with our advertiser clients, we see that campaigns optimized on clicks – as with most programmatic buys – do deliver thousands of cost-efficient clicks. However, as counter intuitive as it seems, our experience is that clickers are not spenders. In fact, they are just as likely to be spenders and non-clickers. Therefore, optimizing on clicks will not provide the same level of actual purchases as that same advertising dollar could generate if targeted and measured based on spend likelihood. We help marketers optimize campaigns based on true sales. Our patented method links online consumer behavior - like exposure to an online display ad, frequency, creative - to online and offline purchases to help marketers accurately evaluate the true sales impact of their efforts. Digital advertising works. If we optimize for currency, returns will increase significantly.Want to read more from about why sales trump clicks as the best metric for marketing effectiveness? Read our full white paper at http://bit.ly/21ReKhH.

We are now in full swing of the New Year and heading into the summer, which means we are at the point of the year where people have actually gotten into a rhythm of committing to their resolutions -- or they have completely dropped them. One of the main resolutions that people commit to is fitness. Through our purchase insights, we found a new fitness trend gaining steam – on-demand and online fitness.

Payments to on-demand fitness services jumped to 7.7% of total spend on workouts last year. This is up from 4.8% two years earlier. We also conducted a migration analysis, looking at users who spent most of their fitness share of spend on big-box gyms and only dabbled in on-demand fitness in 2015, but left their big-box gym in 2016. Users who spent most of their share of spend on big-box gyms and only 12% on on-demand, increased their share of spend to nearly 32% for on-demand fitness after they left their big-box gym.

While we show that big-box gyms still held a considerable share in 2016, approximately 73%, we do show that percentage is dropping year over year.

We shared these fitness purchase insights with The Wall Street Journal and The Baltimore Sun. See The Wall Street Journal story, here, and The Baltimore Sun story, here.