Twenty-eight years of writing what finance tells its customers

Mandate

Combine five product-line advertising teams into one marketing function with a single brand, a measurement model the finance team accepts and a compliance review that keeps pace with the business.

Outcomes

• Led customer communication through the March 2023 deposit outflows; they stopped at US$1.3bn (8.2%) and deposits regained their December 2022 level by March 2024.
• Raised Milwaukee-metro mortgage applications from majority-Black and majority-Hispanic tracts from 4.9% (2023) to 10.7% (2025) of the total by rebuilding advertising delivery.
• Cut median advertising approval time from nineteen business days to six, with one agency contract and one archive for all paid advertising.
• Replaced five product-line campaigns with one Ledgemoor brand; unaided awareness in the Milwaukee and Twin Cities markets rose from 14% to 22% between 2021 and 2025.

Decisions in context

I joined Ledgemoor to turn five product-line advertising teams, each with its own agency and its own idea of the brand, into one marketing function. In the first two years we consolidated agencies, built a measurement model that our finance team signs off each quarter and rebuilt the compliance review with our chief compliance officer. The March 2023 deposit outflows then tested everything at once. I proposed suspending all paid advertising, published a facts page within a day and organised calls to 2,600 clients above the insurance limit. From 2024 the work turned to fair lending, after our fair-lending officer's comparison showed how little of our mortgage advertising reached parts of Milwaukee. I report to our chief executive, present to the board risk committee twice a year and work most closely with our treasurer, general counsel, chief compliance officer and fair-lending officer. I am not a director of the bank or of the holding company.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; completing the small-business deposit relaunch and tract-level delivery reporting for all credit advertising.

Mandate

Build a recognisable brand and a repeatable, compliant acquisition model for a broker whose customers were opening their first investment account.

Outcomes

• Grew funded accounts from about 400,000 to 2.1 million.
• Ended per-account payments to 54 finance creators in 2020; twelve-month retention of creator-sourced accounts rose from 48% to 71%.
• Introduced pre-approval and archiving of all paid creator and partner content with the chief compliance officer.
• Launched a plain-language page setting out every fee with worked examples; fee-related complaints fell 44% in its first year.

Decisions in context

Quillmark wanted people who had never owned an investment to open an account with a small deposit, and my job was to make the brand recognisable and acquisition repeatable. We grew from about 400,000 funded accounts to 2.1 million, mostly through digital advertising, partnerships with employers and, from 2019, finance creators. The creator programme was my creation and my mistake. Paid per account, creators drifted towards urgency and returns, and in June 2020 one video about options produced 61 complaints. With our chief compliance officer I persuaded the board to replace bounties with flat fees and pre-approval, at the cost of a missed account plan. I also rebuilt our fee disclosure into a plain-language page with worked examples. I left in 2021 to return home and to work in banking, where I thought the same lessons applied to products people relied on every day.

Reason for the move

Returned to Milwaukee to lead marketing at a regional bank, in a business where deposits and lending rather than trading carry the customer relationship.

Mandate

Rebuild consumer marketing as the lender returned to purchase-mortgage growth, and bring its advertising into line with tightened mortgage rules and its own pricing.

Outcomes

• Replaced an as-low-as rate headline with the rate the median borrower received; lead-to-application conversion rose from 13% to 20%.
• Cut complaints about advertised rates from 340 (2013) to 80 (2015).
• Reduced reliance on purchased leads from 46% of applications to 21% by 2016 through referral programmes with real-estate agents and past customers.
• Introduced a monthly advertised-rate sign-off by the secondary-marketing desk that sets prices.

Decisions in context

After five years on letters and disclosures, I was asked to run the consumer marketing of a lender that was growing again after the crisis. The marketing I inherited depended on rate-comparison sites and purchased leads, both of which rewarded the lowest headline rate. I spent my first year learning how secondary marketing priced loans and how loan officers were paid, because I could not change the advertising without understanding both. In 2014 we replaced the as-low-as headline with the median borrower's rate after a one-quarter test in two states, and over the next two years we moved spending from purchased leads to referral programmes with real-estate agents and past customers. The work taught me to bring pricing and sales into advertising decisions from the start. I left in 2016 for a brokerage that wanted to apply digital acquisition to people investing for the first time.

Reason for the move

Recruited by Quillmark Investing to build acquisition for a fast-growing brokerage aimed at first-time investors.

Mandate

Rewrite Strathmere's customer letters and disclosures in plain language; from 2008, rebuild the correspondence sent to borrowers in arrears.

Outcomes

• Raised borrower response to loan-modification offers from 18% to 43% by rebuilding the letters around each borrower's own figures.
• Cut the servicing letter library from 640 templates to 190.
• Introduced reading tests with borrowers for every new or revised letter.
• Completed a part-time MBA at Tamsworth University in 2011.

Decisions in context

I joined Strathmere to modernise its letters and disclosures, and within a year the job had become one of the most important in the company. As delinquencies rose in 2008, the letters we sent to borrowers who were behind decided whether they called us before foreclosure became likely. Many did not, partly because our letters buried the offer under legal language. With the servicing and legal teams I rebuilt the correspondence so that the first page showed the borrower's own figures, the choice in front of them and a single telephone number, and we tested every draft by having borrowers read it aloud. Response to loan-modification offers rose from 18% to 43%. We also cut the letter library by more than two-thirds. I studied for an MBA in the evenings during these years, which taught me the economics of servicing that I had been writing around.

Reason for the move

Promoted to lead consumer marketing as Strathmere returned to growth.

Mandate

Write advertising and customer communications for the agency's bank, credit-union and insurance clients.

Outcomes

• Wrote launch campaigns for two community banks and four credit unions.
• Introduced read-aloud testing of financial advertising with people outside the agency before client approval.
• Rewrote one bank client's account-opening materials, cutting branch calls about fees by about a third in its own measurement.
• Promoted to associate creative director in 2005.

Decisions in context

I moved from the newsroom to the agency because I wanted to see how the advertising I had been criticising was made. Kessel & Marr's financial clients were mainly community banks and credit unions in the upper Midwest, with one regional insurer. I wrote rate advertising, branch materials and account-opening packs, and from 2005 led a small team on those accounts. The most useful thing I brought was a reporter's habit of reading the conditions first and asking what a reader would actually understand. I started testing drafts by having people outside the agency read them aloud, which embarrassed some clients and persuaded others. I learnt how many hands shape a financial advertisement, and how rarely any one of them owns what the customer takes away. That lesson took me to a lender that wanted someone to own its customer letters.

Reason for the move

Recruited by Strathmere Home Lending to rewrite its customer letters and disclosures.

Mandate

Cover small businesses and, from 2000, write a weekly personal-finance column answering readers' questions.

Outcomes

• Wrote about 170 personal-finance columns between 2000 and 2003.
• Published a quarterly comparison of savings and checking terms across 23 Milwaukee banks and credit unions.
• Answered about 1,500 reader letters on mortgages, credit cards and retirement products.

Decisions in context

I joined the Sentinel straight from college to cover small businesses in Milwaukee, and in 2000 I took over its weekly personal-finance column. The column was built on readers' letters, which arrived at a rate of several a week: mortgages that had reset, balance transfers with conditions nobody had noticed, annuities sold to elderly parents. I learnt to read disclosures closely, to call the company before writing and to explain a product in terms a reader could act on. I also started a quarterly comparison of savings and checking terms across 23 local banks and credit unions, which taught me how differently institutions described the same product. By 2003 I wanted to understand why financial advertising so often said less than it seemed to, and the best way to find out was to write it.

Reason for the move

Moved to Kessel & Marr to write financial advertising and see how it was produced.