Making Time for Strategy: BMO x Celtra

At Celtra we take great pride in the relationships we build with our customers and love to hear that our solutions and services are making a difference. We’ve reached out to one of our certified Celtra users from BMO, Melissa Porter, who manages marketing on the digital acquisition side of things.

She has started her career as an intern and has been with the company for over 3 years. Her primary role is to support the Mastercard and Visa portfolios through all paid digital marketing channels, and she works closely with our Creative Services team in doing so. As a skilled Celtra user herself, we asked her what it is about the collaboration between Celtra and BMO that has resulted in more effective solutions and how our Creative Services team has given her the chance to devote more time to development and strategy…

Q: What inspires you at work? What special moments or campaigns stand out to you?

Since I work primarily on low-funnel digital creatives, I get most of my inspiration from other financial institutions as well as the product’s welcome offer. A good example is some of the first creatives we developed with the help of Celtra’s Creative Services team to conquer the new CIBC Costco Mastercard. We took inspiration from the BMO CashBack World Elite Mastercard’s welcome offer being the highest earn rate on groceries in Canada, and Mastercard being the only network accepted at Costco to build both social and display paid creatives. There’s also plenty of inspiration to be gained from working with BMO’s agency partners (ex: FCB and UM/Reprise), who help us stay on top of the latest creative best practices, learnings, and strategies.

The social and display creatives were built in Celtra by BMO for the Costco Mastercard. 

Q: What has been the most notable pain point that Celtra has solved for you?

The best part about using Celtra is how quickly we’re able to build multiple creative versions, languages, sizes, etc., through the automation the feed offers. Our team is responsible for the strategy and creation of our low-funnel digital assets, and with the ever-changing nature of digital advertising, Celtra helps us get to market quicker while easily adapting our creatives to changes.

 Q: As an advanced Celtra user yourself, you also use our Creative Services. What specific benefits do you gain from using this service?

I definitely have a strong understanding of the Celtra platform and can easily update and revise current creatives, as well as leverage pre-made templates we developed alongside the Celtra team. What we love about the Creative Services team, is that they act as a creative agency for when we have net-new campaigns and refreshes for our credit cards. They’ve always been able to quickly build high-quality creatives based on our strategy and feedback. This has been extremely beneficial for us, as we require various creative versions for multiple BMO credit cards that run as always on campaigns, both for social and display. Leveraging the Creative Services team has also allowed me to take a more strategic approach to our creatives and apply optimizations and learnings.  

Q:. Are you happy with our collaboration thus far?

We are extremely happy and satisfied with the collaboration between BMO and Celtra since we onboarded just over a year ago! Since then, we’ve gotten other LOBs onto the platform (ex: everyday banking, wealth, etc.) and continue to use Celtra and the Creative Services team to refresh our current creatives. 

The BMO World Elite Cashback Mastercard creatives were developed in Celtra by BMO with the help of our Creative Services team. 

Q: Has your continued partnership with Celtra positively impacted overall business performance and growth at BMO?

Absolutely! This partnership has positively impacted our overall business performance and growth. As mentioned, we now have more time to think strategically about our creative roadmap for the low funnel while producing higher-quality assets with a more modern CMS platform. We also have access to different creative formats (ex: animated HTML, video, image, etc.) with more advanced animations than prior to onboarding Celtra, which I believe has put our assets on par with our competitors.

Learn more about our platform and how your business can benefit from it here. If you’d like to check out what else our Creative Services can offer you, visit the dedicated landing page on our website.