Problem

Regions Bank operates across the South, Midwest, and Texas through 1,500+ branches, nearly 2,000 ATMs, and a broad media mix spanning TV, radio, digital, and owned properties. But with so many touchpoints, the marketing team couldn't identify which combinations of creative, message, and media were actually reducing friction in the customer journey. Traditional marketing mix modeling was too slow, retrospective, and undervalued brand-building activity, leaving the team unable to justify investment across the funnel.

Solution

Regions partnered with Marketing Evolution to build a unified, person-level measurement foundation, combining first-party data with demographic profiles, TV set-top box data, and digital log files. Cross-channel analysis returned segment-level and tactic-level recommendations, identifying the best combinations of message, audience, and media. Crucially, this enabled in-flight optimization: refining spend based on what was working while campaigns were still live.

Insight

• Local relevance was the key differentiator — data revealed that proximity of branches to potential account holders' neighborhoods, and Regions' commitment to local banking, were the strongest drivers of marketing ROI

• Frequency analysis unlocked channel efficiency — frequency-to-impact analysis on cable placements like ESPN Prime pinpointed exactly where additional investment would yield the highest return

• Person-level targeting changed what was possible — segment-level optimization surfaced the right message, audience, and media combinations that siloed measurement had previously obscured

Results

• 2X increase in marketing ROI

• 100% lift in incremental revenue from new checking account openings

• Marketing doubled its contribution to sales

"We now know exactly what we are doing with our media spend, who we are targeting, and how we are using our media to do it."
— Michele Elrod, EVP, Head of Marketing, Regions Bank