Lending Club has created a new television commercial. It was produced by Marketing Architects and is targeted at bringing more borrowers on to the platform. The ad is in testing right now and has been since late August.
According to Lending Club the ad will run nationally and right now they are testing it in different markets on local news, daytime television as well as late night. The ad encourages viewers to go to this URL: www.TryLendingClub.com which takes people to a custom landing page on Lending Club’s site where they can closely track the business it generates. So far Lending Club has said simply that they are “testing TV and evaluating the performance of the ad” but they declined to elaborate more.
Prosper has run some TV ads in the past as has Lending Club but those campaigns were some time ago now. I don’t blame them for giving TV another try and I commend them for tracking it so closely. These are no brand awareness ads that are very difficult to track; Lending Club will be able to determine exactly how much new business this brings in.
I don’t think you will be seeing this ad during the Superbowl (at least I hope not). But they may well reach new people that otherwise may not have considered peer to peer lending or Lending Club. What do you think? Is this a good move or a waste of money?
Peter Renton is the chairman and co-founder of LendIt Fintech, the world’s first and largest digital media and events company focused on fintech. Peter has been writing about fintech since 2010 and he is the author and creator of the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the first and longest-running fintech interview series. Peter has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The New York Times, CNBC, CNN, Fortune, NPR, Fox Business News, the Financial Times, and dozens of other publications.