Citizens Kane

Your marketing team should look, think and act like a media company.

Jan 22, 2023

📸 First, flashback to issue № 60 in which we discussed the perils of flaunting green credentials. This week, Standard Chartered’s CEO demanded clear rules on climate financing, confessing at Davos that potential lenders are “terrified of being accused of greenwashing”. Oh, and remember issue № 66 in which we noted that Santander no longer requires a 2.1 of its graduate trainees? This week, Raconteur explained the trend.

👉🏻 Now, read on to learn why:

① Brands are becoming media companies.

② Your marketing team needs to be adept at storytelling.

③ Wealth management is the gift that keeps on giving.

④ Digital currencies are inevitable.

⑤ Your job is safe from artificial intelligence.

⑥ Swish offices are emerging as weapons in the war for talent.

⑦ Democratic capitalism depends on the probity and wisdom of elites.

What's new

Brokerage firm Robinhood announced this week that it’s launching a financial news subsidiary, Finance Magnates reports.

Source: Finance Magnates, 17 January 2023

In short:

“On Tuesday, Robinhood, a California-based financial services company, announced the expansion of its business with the launch of a financial news platform, Sherwood Media. The company, which operates the major US commission-free stock trading and investing application Robinhood, also runs three other subsidiaries: a digital asset service provider, an institutional brokerage firm, and a broker-dealer and brokerage clearing services provider.”
“Sherwood Media will provide news about financial markets, the economy, business and technology. The new financial news platform will build on the success of Snacks, its daily markets and business newsletter.”
“The company [has appointed] Joshua Topolsky, Bloomberg’s ex-Chief Digital Content Officer, as the Editor-in-Chief and President of Sherwood Media. Topolsky is the Founder and former Chief Editor of The Verge as well as a one-time Vice President of Vox Media, Inc. Topolsky noted that the financial news platform will seek to serve a generation of news consumers with a different perspective on money.”

Why it matters

① As far back as February 2021, we talked about why all brands need to be thinking like a media outlet. Robinhood’s move is the natural conclusion of this evolution: brands are literally becoming media companies. In Issue № 10 I wrote:

People are naturally sceptical, they are increasingly immune to ‘broadcast’ communications. Instead they rely on their networks - whether in person or via online social channels - and their guts. They respond to content that resonates with them. Brands that want to get noticed need to appeal to that emotional trigger with content that informs, inspires and entertains.

Today, as the latest Edelman study - somewhat depressingly - shows that journalists are among the least trusted people, the opportunity for brands to distinguish themselves through high-quality editorial content has never been greater.

Source: Journalism.co.uk, 18 January 2023

Robinhood’s move matters because it’s the best illustration we’ve yet seen of how a fintech company’s commercial success is intrinsically linked to the quality of its content marketing.

What to do about it

Take action

Consider your current marketing content. Is it up to scratch? Could you, if you were so inclined, run your content marketing operation as a separate, revenue generating business? Is your content compelling enough to attract your target customers? Would advertisers want to reach your audience and be happy for their brand to co-exist with yours? The answer is likely ‘no’. But that’s what you should be striving for.

② How do you make it happen? Some thoughts:

Prioritise content creation and assign it to a specialised function within your business.
Hire people with editorial and production skills, then steep them in your brand’s culture and allow them to create without the expectation that every click will lead to a transaction.
Accept that content is not a marketing campaign or advertising. It’s a creative process of authoring, animating and expanding your brand story and, in doing so, cultivating a community of loyal and engaged fans.

In short, your marketing team needs to be adept at storytelling. They should uncover the why of your product in order to tell your customers the simple story behind often complex solutions.

Get help

Visit InMarketing, my resource library for leaders in finance or technology who want to innovate, interact and influence.
Join the InMarketing community, either on Twitter or on Substack (you’ll need to download the Substack app and head to the chat tab). Either way, you can ask questions of me and fellow senior marketing practitioners.

Help me

If you found this useful or know someone who would, please share it. It would really help me to grow the community of regular IMTW readers.

Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

Morgan Stanley pulls the Pepsi trick on Goldman

③ Wealth management is the gift that keeps on giving.

Source: The Financial Times, 20 January 2023

“Morgan Stanley has pulled the PepsiCo trick on Goldman: Coke beats Pepsi in selling soda but PepsiCo has an equally large business in salty snacks, having merged with Frito-Lay in 1965 and expanded since. Morgan Stanley’s equivalent of snacks is wealth and investment management, which investors rate because it is steadier than financial trading.”
“Purity is appealing and while Goldman was a private partnership, it could decide its own destiny. Since its partners preferred the roller-coaster ride of investment banking to retail broking, that was it: they did not need to play safe, like Morgan Stanley. But when Goldman went public in 1999, it put itself in the hands of shareholders, who are now unimpressed.”
“The crisis showed that investment banks were fragile and needed to become more stable by reaching beyond Wall Street. Morgan Stanley restructured fast, while Goldman remained cautious, gradually launching Marcus savings accounts, Apple and GM credit cards, and US online loans, with poor results. It trod carefully but still contrived to mess things up. You might think an investment bank that employs thousands of M&A bankers and corporate finance specialists would know the answer, but Goldman seems to be better at advising others than helping itself. If all else fails, it could follow its rival.”

TECHNOLOGY

Bank of America says CBDCs are the future of money and payments

④ Digital currencies are inevitable.

“Digital currencies, such as central bank digital currencies and stablecoins, are the natural evolution of money and payments, Bank of America said in a research report on Tuesday.”
“‘CBDCs do not change the definition of money, but will likely change how and when value is transferred over the next 15 years,’ analysts led by Alkesh Shah wrote, adding that central bank digital currencies have ‘the potential to revolutionize global financial systems and may be the most significant technological advancement in the history of money’.”
“The benefits and risks of CBDCs depend on their design and issuance, but Bank of America expects central banks in developed economies to focus on payments efficiency and those on developing countries to focus on financial inclusion.”

MEDIA & MARKETING

Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content

⑤ Your job is safe: artificial intelligence is helpless without creative content from humans.

“Getty Images is suing Stability AI, creators of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, over alleged copyright violation. The stock photo company said it believes that Stability AI ‘unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright’ to train its software and that Getty Images has ‘commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London’ against the firm.”
“The lawsuit marks an escalation in the developing legal battle between AI firms and content creators for credit, profit, and the future direction of the creative industries. AI art tools like Stable Diffusion rely on human-created images for training data, which companies scrape from the web, often without their creators’ knowledge or consent.”
“Although the creators of some AI image tools (like OpenAI) refuse to disclose the data used to create their models, Stable Diffusion’s training dataset is open source. An independent analysis of the dataset found that Getty Images and other stock image sites constitute a large portion of its contents, and evidence of Getty Images’ presence can be seen in the AI software’s tendency to recreate the company’s watermark [see above].”

WILDCARD

The rise of the uber-luxurious office

⑥ Swish offices are emerging as weapons in the war for talent.

“Across the rich world, the commercial-property industry is in a grim state. Tenants have come to terms with the fact that working from home is here to stay, and are downsizing appropriately. Global investment in offices last year fell by 42%, compared with a 28% drop for property as a whole.”
“The picture at the top of the commercial property market is very different to the misery in the lower echelons. Last year tenants in Manhattan signed deals for 6.1m square feet (566,709 square metres) of high-end office space, double the amount the year before. The luxurious turn was under way before the pandemic, but accelerated as companies found themselves in competition with home offices. If a firm needs space for only half its workers each day, it can pay more per square foot.”
“The ambition is to make life as cushy as possible for workers—not just to get people back into the office, but also to aid recruitment in a tight labour market. Tenants at 50 Hudson Yards, home to BlackRock and Meta, have access to a helipad, which offers five-minute transfers to John F. Kennedy International Airport for roughly the price of an Uber SUV.”

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Martin Wolf, the FT’s Chief Economics Commentator, in defence of democratic capitalism:

“Among the most important sources of legitimacy is widely shared prosperity. A big part of the reason for the erosion of trust in elites has accordingly been a long-term relative economic decline of significant parts of the working and middle classes. […] Only if trust is revived will the legitimacy of the system be protected against its predators, who are not only without, but also, alas, within.”

Don’t settle for marketing.

Strive for InMarketing: innovate, interact, influence.

Wishing you a productive week,

P.S. I caught up with a friend at Black’s on Thursday and can report that it was packed with merry members, quite insouciant in the face of a cost of living crisis.