Expedia's Shiv Singh Lands at LendingTree

LendingTree has spent the past year rebuilding its leadership team. Now, the online loan and insurance marketplace is ready to rebuild its brand and its connection to consumers under marketing leader Shiv Singh. Singh joins LendingTree as chief marketing and customer experience officer after nearly two years at Expedia. During that time, Singh, who served as svp/gm, managed the travel booking portal’s marketing refresh and helped pave the way for its upcoming spot in the Super Bowl. So far, Singh’s marketing career has taken him from early interactive ad agency Razorfish to Pepsi and Visa, on to health tech startup Eargo. LendingTree may have little in common with those other companies. Nevertheless, Singh described his hiring as representing a “return to roots” for both himself and the brand. On a personal level, Singh noted he’s a “banker’s son.” On the career front, Visa provided him with clear financial services experience. And, at its core, Expedia is an online marketplace—as is LendingTree. But Singh’s view of helping take 26-year-old LendingTree back to its own beginnings is clearer cut. “We want to live up to that original promise of being the ultimate customer advocate in the financial services space,” Singh told Adweek. LendingTree branches out In other words, that means fully embracing the ethos of LendingTree’s late 1990s/early 2000s marketing tagline: “When banks compete, you win.” In between those times—which includes the 2008 economic crisis—and now, LendingTree’s message was the much less memorable, “You to the rescue.” These days, the company’s tagline is, “May the best loan win.” At just two weeks into the job, Singh is careful to emphasize that the brand is not necessarily bringing that tagline back to its marketing and advertising. But he is more certain about rounding out LendingTree’s communications. Over the last several years, the company has primarily focused its brand strategy on performance marketing. SEO and lead gen, in particular, were used to capture consumers looking for loan comparisons. A new leaf But last spring, LendingTree’s leaders recognized it was time for a change. Following the 2019 departure of its last CMO, Brad Wilson, who gave the brand its last major refresh, LendingTree began branching out. The company brought in executives like Jorge de Castro, following the pain of the first phase of the pandemic, to expand its b-to-b business. De Castro is being promoted to svp of partnerships. At the same time, Neil Salvage, who has held various leadership posts since coming to LendingTree in 2013, is leaving the company this month. He’s being replaced by J.D. Moriarty, who’s moving over from his role at LendingTree Next, its consumer experience business. The company's reorganization is also meant to address where consumers’ thinking is when it comes to banking at a time of historically high inflation and an increasingly volatile stock market: finance is frighteningly complicated. “[LendingTree CEO and Chairman] Doug Lebda, who started the company when he tried to get a loan for an apartment, realized he had to run from bank to bank to bank to figure out what was the best deal,” Singh said. “He knew consumers needed something better. And that little idea sparked an amazing business that has now served more than 100 million customers and $30 billion in loans. "The goal we started with is the goal we have now: be the ultimate consumer champion by helping people determine who best to get their loan or their insurance from.” Pepsi Drops Stunning Trailer for Super Bowl 56 Halftime Show With All 5 Performers The challenge for Singh and his team is to communicate that idea through a range of media and branding options. To find his own best path, the focus is already set by the title Singh has taken on. The meaning of experience It’s telling that Singh’s job is CM&EO and not CMO. That marketing leader role has been going through a great deal of upheaval—much more than this always-shifting title tends to come with. The idea of the CMO+ encompasses the wider marketing portfolio branding decision-makers have had to take on. The chief marketing and experience officer reflects the need to own social, commerce and design beyond the typical advertising and communications strategy responsibilities. Current marketing leaders must oversee all the consumer touchpoints that define a brand interaction, noted Singh. “Consumers expect everything to be an Apple iPhone-like experience,” Singh said. “The beauty of it is, historically, the CMOs would think about everything until the consumer interacted with the product.” When Singh was at Pepsi, for example, “there was nothing about my job that touched the physical product. It was everything before that.” The job was to manage Super Bowl ads; it involved overseeing display ads. His marketing duties were charged with running creative, media planning and buying. State Farm Picks TikTok Over TV in Super Bowl Ad Shuffle “This was always true of digital companies, where the consumer's experience starts and end is considered one journey,” Singh said. “But for most businesses, we didn’t think of all the aspects of a consumer’s interaction holistically as one experience. We would slice and dice it into separate little functions. And everyone would only care about their own piece, not about how it then affects the next step in the consumer’s journey with a brand. “I believe the future of marketing, regardless of titles and stuff like that, demands that brand leaders look at those customer experiences completely and with enough care so that every pixel, every punctuation mark and every impression get equal and extreme love,” Singh added. “That's what's needed at every marketer right now.”

Branding

Shiv Singh Takes Flight from Expedia to Lead Marketing at LendingTree

The former Pepsi and Visa branding veteran’s arrival is part of the financial services marketplace’s attempt to ‘return to its roots’

David Kaplan

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David Kaplan