That's What I Call Marketing

Banking is one of the hardest categories in marketing.

Trust is fragile. Customer expectations are shaped by every app on their phone, not just other banks. And every interaction has the potential to redefine the relationship.
In this episode of That’s What I Call Marketing, Conor Byrne sits down with Laura Lynch, CMO of Bank of Ireland, to explore what it actually means to build a modern banking brand in 2026.
Laura takes us inside Bank of Ireland’s recent brand transformation, including the thinking behind the new “Right With You” platform, the role of customer experience in shaping strategy, and why the bank deliberately avoided category clichés in its latest advertising work.
The conversation also explores:
Why Laura stepped out of traditional marketing roles before becoming CMO
How customer trust is rebuilt after the banking crisis
The balance between AI, personalisation and human connection
Why marketers can become too focused on attribution and performance metrics
The challenge of creating distinctive advertising in regulated categories
How Bank of Ireland uses customer insight, segmentation and CX to shape growth
The role of leadership, resilience and timing in building a marketing career
Laura also shares the inside story behind Bank of Ireland’s latest campaigns, including the strategic use of humour, movie references, and why every line, casting decision and creative choice was intentionally designed to create distinction.
For marketers working in financial services, regulated industries, or legacy brands navigating change, this is a fascinating look at how modern brand building actually works inside one of Ireland’s most important organisations.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Why trust in banking has to be earned every day
02:00 – Laura Lynch’s path to becoming CMO of Bank of Ireland
06:30 – Leaving traditional marketing to build customer experience capability
10:00 – Going “all in” to land the CMO role
13:00 – Leadership, intensity and avoiding groupthink
16:30 – The reality of leading marketing inside a major bank
18:00 – Rebuilding customer trust after the banking crisis
20:00 – Why banking competition has fundamentally changed
21:30 – Inside Bank of Ireland’s new brand strategy
24:00 – Building “Right With You” with customers and colleagues
27:00 – Why the strategy had to stretch the organisation
29:00 – The making of the new Bank of Ireland advertising
32:00 – Using humour to talk about fraud and financial confidence
35:00 – Creating distinctive work in a regulated category
37:00 – AI, personalisation and the future of marketing teams
39:00 – Why performance marketing alone is not enough

Brought to you by Tracksuit
Tracksuit is the always-on brand tracking platform helping marketers understand brand health, measure impact, and make better decisions over time.
👉 https://gotracksuit.com
Listen / Follow That’s What I Call Marketing:
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7MXhujDpTzbSRRbyQFgdWp
📩 Email: [email protected]
Subscribe for weekly conversations with leading marketers.
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The Singles is back with Tracksuit, taking some of the biggest marketing stories in culture right now and putting them under a bit more pressure using real brand data.
Because the interesting part is rarely just the campaign itself. It is what the campaign reveals about the category, the audience, and the way brands are trying to grow.
In this episode, Conor Byrne is joined by Ed Parkin and Bella Harrison from Tracksuit to explore three very different examples of brands using culture, entertainment, and timing to build relevance.

Lucky Saint shows how alcohol-free beer has moved far beyond Dry January, using Lime Bikes, London culture, run clubs, and moderation trends to position itself as a year-round brand for active urban consumers.

Lego demonstrates why it remains one of the most culturally flexible brands in the world, turning the FIFA World Cup into entertainment before a ball has even been kicked, while continuing to stretch beyond the toy category into fandom, collectibles, and adult audiences.

The conversation then turns to the latest Entertain or Die Report, looking at why entertainment is increasingly becoming a commercial growth strategy rather than just a creative ambition.

The episode also explores:
Why brands are now competing against Netflix, TikTok, creators, and sport for attention
The shift from “salesmanship” to “showmanship” in advertising
Why entertaining brands are outperforming commercially
What brands like Currys, Compare the Market, Guinness Zero, and Lego are getting right
How mental availability is built long before purchase moments happen
If you want a deeper understanding of how entertainment, culture, and brand growth connect together, this episode is packed with practical examples and real-world data.

Listen to Paul Feldwick on That's What I Call Marketing here:
Paul Feldwick on That's What I Call Marketing

Read the full Entertain or Die report:
Entertain or Die Report

Find out more about Tracksuit:
Tracksuit
Listen to more episodes of That's What I Call Marketing:
That's What I Call Marketing

Timestamps:

02:06 – Lucky Saint and the rise of moderation culture
03:24 – Why Lucky Saint is so culturally aware
05:05 – Lime Bikes, London culture, and timing
07:08 – The functional drinks category shift
08:45 – Alcohol-free beer becoming mainstream
10:00 – Guinness Zero vs Lucky Saint
11:18 – Winning locally before scaling nationally
13:22 – Brand perception and category positioning
15:00 – Lego and the FIFA World Cup campaign
16:01 – Why Lego works across every demographic
18:22 – Lego’s cultural timing advantage
20:00 – Lego, fandom, and entertainment
21:40 – World Cup advertising and brand competition
22:15 – Entertain or Die explained
24:00 – Why entertainment drives commercial growth
25:35 – Future demand and entertainment
26:17 – Gap hires a Chief Entertainment Officer
27:09 – What makes brands entertaining
29:00 – Brands that entertain us today
31:00 – Why culture matters inside companies
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We talk about personalisation as if it’s about the person. It isn’t. It’s about prediction.”
That line sits at the centre of this conversation with James Taylor, CEO & Founder of A Particular Audience and once you hear it properly, it’s difficult to go back to how most marketing teams currently think about relevance. Because for years, personalisation has been framed as something close to one-to-one messaging. The idea that if we just had enough data, we could tailor every experience to the individual. It sounds right. It feels intuitive. And yet, in practice, it has largely disappointed.

What James lays out here is a different way of understanding the problem.
Not who the customer is — but what they are doing.
Not static segments — but real-time signals.
Not demographics — but behaviour.

Drawing on his experience building AI-driven recommendation systems used by global retailers, he explains how the most effective ecommerce experiences are not built around people, but around patterns. Around the relationships between products, actions, and intent. Around what millions of other customers have done before you, and what that makes likely next. This fundamentally changes how you think about websites, search, media, and even creativity.

Along the way, the conversation explores why so many early personalisation efforts failed, how Amazon and Netflix approached the problem differently, and why most retailers are still playing catch-up despite having access to the same underlying data.
There’s also a more grounded thread running through it — the reality of AI in practice. Not the version you see in product demos or LinkedIn posts, but the version that still requires constraints, rules, and human oversight. The version that gets things wrong. The version that can be incredibly powerful, but only when properly understood.
For marketers, there’s a useful tension here, on one side, the promise of hyper-relevance and automation, on the other, the discipline required to make it actually work.

This episode sits right in that space.
⏱️ Key Moments:
00:00 – Why “you are not your demographic” changes everything
02:15 – From investment banking to building AI products
08:00 – The real meaning of personalisation (and why it’s been misunderstood)
12:30 – Behaviour vs demographics: what actually drives relevance
18:00 – Building a recommendation engine from scratch
26:00 – Why most retailers still lag behind Amazon
30:00 – How AI is changing marketing teams
34:00 – The limits of AI (and why rules still matter)
36:30 – “Personalisation is just good prediction”
What you’ll take from this episode:
Why most personalisation strategies fail to deliver
How recommendation systems actually work in ecommerce
The difference between explicit and implicit customer signals
Why demographics are often a poor proxy for behaviour
How AI should (and shouldn’t) be used in marketing today
What marketers need to rethink about relevance and experience design

Brought to you by Tracksuit
Tracksuit is the always-on brand tracking platform helping marketers understand brand health, measure impact, and make better decisions over time.
👉 https://gotracksuit.com
Listen / Follow That’s What I Call Marketing:
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7MXhujDpTzbSRRbyQFgdWp
📩 Email: [email protected]
Subscribe for weekly conversations with leading marketers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How Brands Should Really Be Planning Christmas Campaigns
What happens when you start planning Christmas… in April?
In this episode of That’s What I Call Marketing, Conor Byrne is joined by Pete Markey (former CMO of Boots, Marketing Week Marketer of the Year) and Leanne Tomasevic (Insights Lead at Electric Twin) to explore how brands should approach Christmas advertising — using real-time synthetic audience insights.
Instead of guessing what consumers want, this episode puts Electric Twin’s platform to the test live, revealing how marketers can simulate audience reactions, test ideas, and sharpen creative briefs months before campaigns go live.
The result is a grounded, practical look at:
What people actually want from Christmas ads in 2026
Why emotional storytelling still matters (but needs reframing)
The role of celebrities, music, and consistency
How to balance commercial pressure with authenticity
And how AI-driven research can speed up better decisions
If you’re working on a Christmas campaign, brand strategy, or creative development, this is a genuinely useful watch.
⏱️ Timestamps
00:00 – The reality of planning Christmas in April
01:10 – What Electric Twin actually does (synthetic audiences explained)
03:00 – Why speed matters in modern marketing decision-making
05:30 – Live demo: Understanding the mood of the nation at Christmas
08:30 – What consumers really want this year (family, realism, restraint)
12:00 – Gifting trends: practicality vs meaningful connection
14:30 – The balance between storytelling and selling
16:00 – What people want from Christmas ads now
18:00 – Should brands use celebrities? (and when it works)
21:00 – The role of consistency (Kevin the Carrot, John Lewis, Coca-Cola)
24:00 – Realism vs escapism in Christmas creative
27:00 – How agencies can use this to build stronger briefs
29:00 – The most memorable Christmas ads and why they last
32:00 – Should brands reuse ads instead of making new ones?
33:00 – Why music is critical to Christmas advertising effectiveness
35:30 – Final thoughts: faster insight, better decisions
🎯 Key Takeaways
Christmas advertising isn’t about excess — it’s about connection under constraint
Consumers want authenticity, not performance
Creative effectiveness improves when insight is iterative, not static
Consistency often beats novelty in building long-term brand memory
AI isn’t replacing research — it’s changing how quickly you can think
🔗 Links & Resources
Learn more about Electric Twin: https://electrictwin.com
Listen to more episodes: That’s What I Call Marketing
Previous episode with Dr. Ben Warner (Synthetic Research deep dive)
🎙️ About the Podcast
That’s What I Call Marketing features conversations with leading marketers, CMOs, and industry thinkers — focused on how marketing actually works in practice.
If you’re working on Christmas 2026 right now, get in touch with Electric Twin

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The Singles is back with a new line-up from Tracksuit, looking at the marketing stories everyone is talking about In this episode joined by Bella & Ed we take a look at the data behind three very different moments
McDonald’s shifts the conversation away from product and towards Gen Z employees, at a time when confidence in job opportunities for young people is low. It could easily have drifted into familiar employer-brand territory, but early signals suggest it is doing something more meaningful, with trust moving among younger audiences in a category where that is not easy to shift.
KitKat finds itself at the centre of a global story after 12 tonnes of product are stolen, and instead of containing it, turns it into something participatory. Consumers are actively engaging, brands are joining in, and even a “KitKat” crypto coin spikes by 2000%. Most reactive marketing creates attention. Very little of it changes behaviour. This one starts to.
Justin Bieber’s Coachella set works in a different way, stripping everything back and building the performance around YouTube. Nearly 6 million people stream it, and it splits opinion in a way that keeps it moving. It takes something familiar and presents it in a way that forces people to reprocess it, which is often where attention sustains rather than fades.

Along the way, the conversation gets into why authenticity is showing up differently in production, how nostalgia actually works when brands get it right, and why participation is becoming more valuable than passive reach.

05:00 – McDonald’s: trust, Gen Z and employer brand
10:30 – KitKat: heist, participation and brand response
15:50 – Justin Bieber: YouTube, nostalgia and polarisation
20:30 – Nostalgia in advertising and brand memory
25:00 – Always-on tracking and what the data shows

Don't forget to check out the new Entertain or Die report at Tracksuit

COMING SOON - TWICM Training course will launch, stay tuned
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