The marketing chief turning a Richmond regional bank into the one that listens - and betting a whole campaign on the idea that big banks forgot how.
Walk into most bank advertising and you get the same picture. A rate in a big font. An app on a phone. A family on a porch that has clearly never worried about a payment. Christine Landi looked at all of that and reached for something smaller and harder to fake - the feeling you get when a bank makes you feel like an account number at exactly the moment you needed a person.
Landi is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Atlantic Union Bank, the largest regional bank headquartered in Virginia. Her job, stripped of the org chart, is to make a couple of million people across three states feel differently about a company most of them drive past without noticing. In 2024 she pointed that job at one idea and did not blink: banking should bend to how you live, not the other way around. The campaign got a name that doubles as a promise - "Any Way You Bank."
Every good campaign has a sentence you can carry out of the room. Landi's has one, and it is close to perfect in its plainness: "We don't have tellers. We have listeners." Swap one word for another and the whole business changes shape. A teller moves money. A listener notices you. It is the difference between a transaction and a relationship, compressed into six words.
That is the real engine underneath the marketing. Landi did not start with what Atlantic Union sells. She started with a frustration everyone already owns - the big-bank cold shoulder that arrives right when a decision actually matters, when you are buying a first house or trying to keep a small business alive through a slow quarter. Name the frustration honestly, then be the opposite of it. Most category leaders spend their budgets pretending that complaint does not exist. Landi built the whole story on top of it.
Landi did not arrive at a CMO title by accident, and she did not arrive quickly. Her first job out of school was as an assistant buyer at Woodward & Lothrop, the old Washington department store - a floor-level education in what people actually reach for versus what a catalog says they should. From there the through-line is finance and the customer inside it: marketing manager at Servus Financial, a small-business marketing analyst at Signet Bank, then a long, formative run at Capital One.
Capital One is where the customer-experience instinct hardened into a discipline. She held senior director roles across customer engagement marketing, enterprise digital marketing, enterprise customer experience and brand marketing - the parts of a modern card company obsessed with how a person feels at every touch. A stint at Cigna, leading strategic marketing communications, added the harder problem of building trust in a category people approach with their guard up. Banking and healthcare share that DNA: both ask strangers to hand over the things they protect most.
Career at a glance
The pattern is worth pausing on. Retail taught her demand. Card marketing taught her experience at scale. Healthcare taught her trust. All three fold neatly into the problem she owns now, which is convincing people that a bank they can drive to is smarter than a bank they can only call.
There is a quiet confidence in how Landi frames Atlantic Union. She does not pretend it is the biggest name in the room. She leans the other way, using size as the setup rather than the punchline. The campaign talks about running your business your way, living your best life, and being heard instead of processed. It reads less like a bank talking and more like someone on your side who happens to work at one.
The rollout matched the ambition. It ran across television, radio, out-of-home, digital, streaming audio and podcasts - the full menu - and it stretched across Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. Landi built it with RP3 Agency, a woman-owned creative shop, and a woman-owned media partner in the Spurrier Group. For a regional brand fighting national giants for attention, showing up everywhere at once is not vanity. It is how you convince a market you are a real alternative rather than a rounding error.
Where the story lands
There is a neat symmetry in Landi's current chapter that she does not oversell. She learned commerce at the University of Virginia, in a school built to turn out exactly this kind of business mind. Decades later she is marketing the biggest bank her home state can claim. The Commerce degree came with a second concentration in human resource management, which is a small tell about how she thinks - people first, systems second. That instinct shows up in every "listener, not teller" line the bank runs.
It also explains why the campaign avoids the usual trap of financial advertising, where empathy is a font choice and nothing more. Landi's version tries to make empathy the actual product. Whether a bank can deliver on that promise at every branch and call center is the harder question, and it is the one a CMO cannot answer alone. But setting the bar in public, in three states, on television, is its own kind of accountability. You cannot promise to listen and then not.
Peel away the banking specifics and Landi's move works in almost any crowded category. People do not switch because of a marginally better number. They switch because someone finally understood them. Find the complaint your whole industry has trained itself not to hear, say it out loud before your customer has to, and then build everything around being the fix. It is not a trick. It is just harder than buying another rate ad, which is exactly why so few brands do it.
Thirty-six years in, Landi still leads with the customer's frustration instead of the company's features. That is rarer than a long resume usually allows. Careers that long tend to calcify into caution. Hers seems to have gone the other way - toward a clearer, plainer conviction that the job is to make one person feel understood, and to do it a few million times at once.