Looking back: when there were no super-regional and little local competition: three persons long affiliated with the ABA Marketing Network reminisce in observance of the organization's 90th anniversary.

• Position: Marketing edge - Interview

The time was 1915.

The passenger ship Titanic had struck an iceberg and sunk three years earlier. The new Federal Reserve banking system had been formed two years before. World War I had broken out the previous summer.

It was during this year that a man by the name of Marvin E Holderness formed a new organization called the Financial Advertiser's Association. Decades later, the group would evolve into what is known today as the ABA Marketing Network.

Thus, the year 2005 marks the 90th anniversary of the creation of the ABA Marketing Network.

Happy birthday ABAMN!

Between now and the ABA Marketing Conference in September, ABA Bank Marketing magazine will present a series of articles about the ABA Marketing Network's history and the significance of its anniversary.

We begin with an interview with three personalities who have been associated with the ABA Marketing Network for many years. They are:

J. Douglas Adamson, Washington, D.C., executive director since 1988 of the ABA Marketing Network and its predecessor organization, the Bank Marketing Association. He is executive director of ABA's Professional Development Group.

Barry I. Deutsch, Palm Beach Garden, Fla., was an active member 4 the Bank Marketing Association in the 1980s and served as president in 1984 and again in the early 1990s after the organization merged with ABA. He is currently president of his own consulting firm, The Deutsch Consultancy Corp.

Dr. James H. Donnelly Jr., Lexington, Ky, the dean of the ABA School of Bank Marketing and Management also Chair of ICB's CFMP Board and ex-officio ABAMN Council member and a professor of business at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Dr. Donnelly has been affiliated with the school and with the ABA Marketing Network for more than three decades.

We posed the questions below to all three. Their answers follow.

Q: When you were involved with bank marketers, whet were your observations of the difficulties that marketers were addressing?

Donnelly: Over 30 years ago when I first became involved with the School of Bank Marketing and Management (SBMM) as a faculty member, the industry was just beginning to emerge from an environment of exclusivity of product offerings, regulated pricing and protected markets into one of deregulated product offerings, geographic expansion and increased competition. At that time, marketers were primarily tacticians. They managed and implemented advertising, promotion and public relations. Their biggest...