What keeps Matt Houghton up at night?

By Will Novosedlik

In this series, we ask top industry execs and marketers across the country about their biggest fears and concerns. What are the things of marketing nightmares? This week, we caught up with Matt Houghton, director of digital and integrated marketing for Interac, about the biggest problems he faces. 

In his current role, Houghton manages both mass advertising campaigns and always-on marketing across digital and social channels, and works closely with internal stakeholders across communications, product and innovation to help amplify brand messaging and business priorities.

What’s keeping you up at night these days?

Trying to do it all as a marketer. There are so many things to do. But to strongly align yourself to the needs of the business, you have to focus.

At Interac, our greatest opportunity is speaking to both the business community and consumers. Most of our marketing efforts historically have been biased towards the consumer. But as the brand evolves, we really need to focus more on the business audience, specifically small business and mid-size enterprise.

Interac is changing so much in terms of its core payment products and moving into verification solutions and really diversifying what our core message is to Canadians. So, for me, I just want to do everything, you know what I mean? But there’s not enough time and budget and energy to do it all. And so I think it’s that push and pull of wanting to be able to speak to all the audiences all the time, but really having to hone in on the priority messages and what the business needs from us, and how we can best support them.

You could spend your days coming up with any number of exceptional creative campaigns and brand storytelling, but we’re very product-centric and we need to drive transactions, increase our connections and broaden the perception of who we are with the business community.

Why would you think of the business community as separate from consumers?

One thing I often say to our agencies is to remember that everyone’s a consumer. We’re targeting a business audience with a business-centric message, but they’re also consumers. So there’s an understanding that they will know our brand, and will have a level of awareness and consideration and usage of our brand. But we might be going to them with a different message than we would to a consumer. For instance how do we address the emergence of the side hustle and the micro SMB, the really small scale independently run businesses?

It’s a real growth area in Canada. I think about what we can say to those people who are starting or building a small side business, and we can message them much like we would a consumer, where the products they use as a consumer cross over nicely with their business needs. For instance, if they’re already familiar with using Interac e-transfer as a consumer, they can also use it for their business. If you pay for things with your debit card, you can get a payment terminal and accept payments with debit cards as well. So there’s a really nice sweet spot for us in that sort of micro side hustle space that I think is really exciting. And I think it’s a really relevant category to market to.

So what’s the difference between using Interac for personal or for business?

We have a campaign that’s in market right now – the first national ad campaign we’ve done that actively targets business owners and decision makers. One of the bigger challenges is that, as Interac evolves, we need this community’s perception of Interac to evolve along with it. And one of the biggest challenges here is communicating how Interac provides value exchange for Canadians and Canadian businesses. So not just things like the ability to pay and get paid, but also things like verification solutions, so that you can verify your identity online, whether that’s in addition to, or separate from, transacting.

So imagine you are applying for a loan, or paying your taxes, you need to verify who you are in a marketplace setting. We now have solutions that allow you to do that seamlessly. It’s a new proposition for the business community that they may not know about or that they haven’t used yet. This is something they can enable in their business if they have that need. We’ve also taken the e-transfer product and broadened it so businesses can use it with higher payment levels.

You’ve been around for 40 years and enjoy high brand awareness. Are there any downsides to being such an established brand?

We’re really entrenched in Canadian’s lives. The ubiquity of our products and services is both a strength and a weakness. You know, if you’re using your own money, if you’re paying with debit, you’ve got your bank card in your wallet and you’re tapping it to make a payment, or you’ve got it provisioned on your phone in your Apple Pay or Google Pay. Interac started as a way for all the banks to have a single solution to power ATMs. And we still do that, but the primary way that people use debit is through their phones, whether it’s tapping to make purchases or doing that online through Apple Pay or Google Pay for e-comm. So they need to understand that we’re accessible in those channels as well.

So as we grow, we have to broaden how people perceive us. We need to expand that definition in their mind that we’re driving the digital economy. From a marketing perspective, there’s the ability to build on some very strong foundational brand awareness and trust. That enables us to be a lot more product centric in what we say to people and how we help them understand the new and different ways that they can use Interac. For example, you can now use debit for transit in many cities across Canada.

Is that what’s behind your “Sound of Spending” and “Sound Shopping” campaigns of the last two years?

As a brand, we want to create confidence and give people a sense of empowerment [and] control. The role of music in both of those campaigns was a really exciting way to express emotion. That first sound shopping concept was about patterns of transactional data that told the story of how Canadians had been spending their money during the pandemic. It was a story of how our lives had changed through data. We built an app that turned data points into music.

I’m such a believer in the right message for the right person in the right place at the right time. And wanting to be relevant, accurate and targeted so that what I’m telling you is right for you and what I’m telling someone else is right for them, based on how you spend your money and who you are. With a campaign like “Sound of Spending” or “Sound Shopping,” there’s the ability to create something that has universal appeal, while coming from a place of real intent.

As much fun as it is to put award-winning campaigns like that into the market, what ultimately keeps me up at night is whether or not we’re moving the business forward. Are we telling the story that Interac needs us to tell? Are we resonating with the people we need to make an impact? It’s nice when we see the engagement and we see the impact on the business come through, you know?