People First Bank — brand merger

I led People First Bank's brand merger from a digital perspective at EssenceMediacom — one of the more complex assignments of my agency career. The real risk in a merger is not the new name failing to land; it is years of accumulated tracking, structure and signal quietly breaking.

The workstreams

• Value-based bidding (VBB), so bidding decisions reflected what a customer was actually worth rather than raw conversion counts.
• Server-side Google Tag Manager (sGTM), giving measurement the durability and control a bank requires.
• A new data architecture built around first-party data legal requirements — for a bank, privacy obligations shape the design from day one, not as an afterthought.
• Account restructures across the merged brand's digital activity.

The objective throughout: consolidate tracking and bidding without losing momentum through the transition, and leave a clean foundation for growth.