Last week, Bank of America announced their new loyalty solution that capitalizes on the popularity of card linked offers.
BofA will display ads and offers from retailers and restaurants on their bank web pages (powered by our friends over at Cardlytics) and cardholders can link the offers directly to their BofA cards for redemption when they make a purchase. The offers are more relevant and personalized, using purchase history for targeting. Life is easier for the consumer (no more paper coupons or rebates) and brands get direct attribution from the online offers to the offline (bricks and mortar) purchase.

And there you have it: FINALLY a new type of advertising functionality has arrived. I started my career in interactive advertising in the days of Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL back in the 1980’s – since then I have been seeking something new and different to change the advertising industry. It has been a long wait.

Sure, we’ve uncovered new mediums (mobile for instance) but nothing transformational since the first banner ad (AT&T was the advertiser) appeared on Hotwired in 1994. That was the beginning of a whole new type of ad. It was interactive and allowed the consumer to show their interest which translated into performance measurement for the advertiser. Since then? Nothing. No new ad functionality for 18 years. Some folks may argue that targeting solutions and ad delivery innovation falls into this category but that’s all on the back end. Linked offers are all about the convergence of consumer engagement and performance measurement.

So, what does this mean to the advertising marketplace? Well, just like that banner ad in 1994 these new “card linked offers” are growing quickly in popularity. It’s not just a cool new feature. It provides significant measurement for retailers and manufacturers who sell product at retail. Imagine knowing precisely how many consumers have linked and redeemed offers from your online, mobile, TV, print and OOH campaigns. Advertisers can track exactly where and when the offers were linked and get closed loop attribution for online or offline redemption.

But there’s more. Post campaign, the brand is able to run reports on the active audience to see exactly what type of purchase behavior change the campaign(s) produced by looking at past, during and post-campaign buying habits of the participating consumers. All the data is anonymous (so the consumer advocate folks are satisfied too). I’m sure top executives at retailers, brands, banks and credit cards, local merchants, analysts and reporters are all wondering the same thing: How big could this really be?

Let me attempt to answer that question, given everything I know from being one of the first to enter this space in 2010. Unlike the banner ad of 1994, these linkable offers work in all mediums. This is a unique cross platform capability. Take this into consideration. In 2010 CPG brands distributed more than 332 billion coupons in the US, a nearly 7% increase from 2009. More than 3% of these coupons were clipped and redeemed by shoppers. This equates to over $3.5 billion in coupons use…and that is only CPG. So how big could this really be? Pretty big. Keep your eyes on this space, there’s a lot of momentum behind it and the BofA announcement is one of many more to come.