Distinctiveness
The brands that will win with AI are those that have - and enforce - a strong narrative.
Issue № 164 | London, Sunday 3 May 2026
Read on to learn why:
① Failure in AI adoption is not technological but human.
② GEO is the most significant shift in brand visibility in a generation.
③ Risk-aversion and compliance are no excuse for timidity in marketing.
④ Your brand needs to be present where your prospects are forming decisions.
⑤ Viewer habits have shifted to YouTube, your marketing should too.
⑥ Skimping on media training is one of the more expensive false economies.
⑦ To earn trust, you have to walk the talk of your reputation.
🚨 What's new
On Wednesday, I attended the launch of Financial Marketing Insights’ first white paper: Bank 2030 - The Rise of Intelligent Marketing Systems. The paper documents how financial services marketing organisations are navigating AI adoption, and maps four interconnected realities they must manage simultaneously: the psychological experience of individual marketers, the operational reality inside marketing teams, enterprise-level constraints, and external customer expectations. It’s a candid, insider’s view of where the industry actually stands, as opposed to where vendors claim it does.
① The paper’s opening finding sets the tone: most financial services organisations remain stuck in what it calls pre-operational AI — talking about transformation without the structures in place to support it. The dominant stage of maturity, where most FS firms currently sit, is Level 2: AI Enabled, meaning humans still generate the work and AI assists. The shift that defines real maturity — moving from “Human Generation, AI Review” to “AI First, Human Review” — remains something only a small number of organisations have managed. The paper identifies the reason clearly: the failure is not technological but human. Executives are demanding visible AI progress while marketing teams are navigating compliance friction, ungoverned shadow AI usage, workflow uncertainty, and a genuine inability to measure return in terms leadership finds credible.
The paper also documents a phenomenon it calls the Fear Flip, which will resonate with anyone working inside a regulated financial institution. Until recently, the dominant professional anxiety around AI was caution — don’t touch it, don’t paste anything into it, don’t risk a compliance incident. That fear has now inverted: not using AI is the perceived career risk. The practical consequence is Shadow AI, which the paper describes bluntly — people are using personal ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity accounts because enterprise tools are unavailable or too restricted. As one senior communications executive in Asia is quoted: “Your people are already using AI. The question is whether they are doing it with governance and best practices, or secretly, on their phones, between meetings.”
💡 Why it matters
The section that should concern every senior marketer in financial services is the paper’s treatment of generative engine optimisation. The argument is straightforward but its implications are not: search is no longer a list of links. It is increasingly a single synthesised answer generated by an AI model. Generative engines do not crawl, index, and rank. They summarise your brand based on patterns they detect, compress your identity into a few sentences, prioritise clarity and consistency, and fill gaps with probabilistic inference — which can lead to hallucination. This means your brand is no longer what you publish. It is what the model understands about what you publish. For financial services — where products are complex, regulated, and trust-dependent — that distinction is not academic. A hallucinated claim about a financial product is not a minor error. It is a conduct risk, a regulatory breach, and a customer-harm event.
② The paper identifies four GEO imperatives for FS brands: accuracy (hallucination is existential risk, not inconvenience); authority (no longer earned through backlinks but through consistent, factual, well-structured content — which makes specialist media coverage more valuable than it has been in years); distinctiveness (generative engines compress sameness — if your brand sounds like everyone else, the model will treat it like everyone else); and safety (ensuring engines do not misrepresent products or omit critical disclaimers). What is notable is that three of these four imperatives are fundamentally communications and brand disciplines, not technology ones. GEO is not an SEO problem with a different name. It is the most significant shift in brand visibility in a generation, and most marketing teams are treating it as someone else’s problem.
The brands that will win are those that have built a coherent brand operating system — a single narrative and identity that governs how AI executes across every touchpoint.
The paper’s deepest argument — and its most commercially important one — is that AI does not replace marketing. It replaces the parts of marketing where value was tied to effort rather than impact. What that leaves behind, and what becomes more strategically important as a result, are the fundamentals: clarity, distinctiveness, trust, narrative discipline, and customer understanding. In a world where AI can generate infinite content, the competitive advantage is no longer speed or scale. It is distinctiveness. AI accelerates sameness. The brands that will win are not those that produce the most; they are those that have built a coherent brand operating system — a single narrative and identity that governs how AI executes across every channel and touchpoint, rather than being applied as a manual review step after the fact.
✅ What to do about it
Take action
Audit your GEO position before your SEO position. Run searches for your brand, your key products, and your core value proposition in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. What comes back is what prospective clients and counterparties are seeing when they research you without visiting your website. If the answer is vague, generic, or wrong, that is a brand problem — and a risk problem — that no amount of Google ranking will fix.
Reinvest in specialist media relations, specifically. The paper makes explicit what many have suspected: LLMs privilege authoritative, well-structured, factual sources, and media coverage ranks highly in that hierarchy. In financial services, that means consistent, accurate placement in trade publications — not occasional nationals coverage. The PR budget cut of the last five years may have been rational in a search-driven world. In a GEO world, it is a visibility liability.
Treat brand governance as AI governance. Brand voice, tone, terminology, and content structure need to be embedded in the tools and workflows themselves, not applied as a post-production check. The paper frames this as marketing becoming a governance architect rather than a governance recipient. Practically, that means co-creating prompt libraries and acceptable-use standards with Compliance rather than waiting for policy to be handed down.
Diagnose your AI maturity honestly, then move one level. The paper’s four-level framework — AI Curious, AI Enabled, AI Integrated, AI First — is useful precisely because it resists the temptation to describe a single destination. The question is not whether you have an AI strategy. It is whether the people in your team know which workflows to run differently, and whether governance is designed into those workflows rather than bolted on afterwards.
Measure AI impact at the task level first. Most FS marketing teams cannot articulate AI ROI in terms leadership finds credible. The paper recommends starting at task level — time saved per asset, throughput per campaign — before building to longer-cycle commercial validation. An unprovable macro-claim loses the argument. A credible micro-proof builds it incrementally.
Get help
Two ways I can help you:
Tackle a specific challenge by retaining me in an advisory capacity or on a fractional basis.
Elevate all your marketing and communications by hiring me as a full-time member of your team.
🗞️ Top stories
The other articles that are worthy of your time this week.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Not everyone in the City is friends with Savvy the Squirrel
③ Risk-aversion and compliance are no excuse for timidity in marketing.
🚨 The UK government and 20 financial services firms launched the largest retail investing campaign in British history — roughly £8m–£10m a year for three to five years behind ‘Savvy the Squirrel’ to nudge Britons into the stock market. Backers include Hargreaves Lansdown, Vanguard, Schroders and St James’s Place. AJ Bell, Interactive Investor and Freetrade declined to take part. Within days, Peel Hunt CEO Steven Fine was warning that “mascots don’t move markets, policy does”, and calling for the 0.5% stamp duty on shares — which raised a record £4.7bn last year — to be phased out alongside the campaign.
💡 I’m fine with Fine. The deeper marketing failure is the message itself: it’s timid. Britain’s largest investing campaign has chosen, as its hero, an animal whose entire cultural shorthand is hoarding things away — and built a brand around the verb “squirrelling”. You cannot build an investing culture by recycling the imagery and language of saving. The Treasury’s repeated framing of “financial resilience” gives the game away: this is communication designed to alarm nobody and therefore inspire nobody. The team behind it work under genuine constraints — FCA financial promotions rules, the long shadow of mis-selling scandals, a country still bruised by 2008. Those pressures are real but they don’t excuse the timidity. Tell Sid worked in 1986 because it was confident, ambitious, and unapologetic about the upside. Americans run their entire household-wealth narrative on the same instinct. This squirrel is the opposite. The campaign embodies the very risk aversion it claims to fight.
✅ If you communicate financial products to British retail audiences, don’t apologise for the offer. Lead with wealth creation and show real numbers — long-run UK and global equity returns are a clear and compelling story — alongside the risks. Drop the cuddly metaphors and the patronising tone; treat your audience as adults. If you can’t describe your product with conviction, no mascot will do it for you.
TECHNOLOGY
NatWest embeds home-buying options on ChatGPT
④ Your brand needs to be present where your prospects are forming decisions.
🚨 NatWest has become the exclusive mortgage partner for Rightmove, which has launched an application inside ChatGPT. Home buyers searching for properties in ChatGPT can now receive a fully digital NatWest Mortgage in Principle — and, for eligible customers, a full mortgage offer within 24 hours — without ever leaving the platform where the search began.
💡 This is marketing 101, well executed. Customers don’t start their home-buying process on a bank’s website. They start it by thinking out loud — increasingly, inside an AI assistant. NatWest understood that, and rather than waiting for buyers to navigate to their own channels, they met them at the moment of intent. They’re using AI but this is a distribution strategy more than a technology story. Your brand needs to be present wherever your prospects are forming decisions, not just wherever you’ve historically chosen to show up. The battle for customer attention is no longer fought at the front door of your own digital estate.
✅ Research where your target clients are actually spending time when they’re in the mindset that leads to buying your product or service. Then ask honestly how present your brand is in those spaces — not in those spaces’ equivalents five years ago. The answer will tell you where your distribution strategy needs to catch up.
MEDIA & MARKETING
News booms on Youtube: BBC goes top as leading publishers grow 16%
⑤ Viewer habits are shifting to YouTube, your marketing should too.
🚨 Three signals in a single week show how the news landscape is shifting. Press Gazette’s 2026 ranking puts the BBC top of news publishers on YouTube with 19.7 million subscribers; the leading channels grew 16% over fifteen months, viewers consumed 15 billion hours of news on the platform in the first half of 2025, and half of US poll voters now get more news from YouTube than from traditional TV. Sky News’s executive editor Jonathan Levy has called breaking news “commoditised” and is pivoting the channel to depth, analysis and digital video. Meanwhile, Peter Thiel-backed startup Objection has launched an AI platform that rates journalists in real time, citing a collapse in US trust in news media from 70% in 1970 to under 30% today.
💡 The traditional gatekeepers no longer monopolise reach or trust. Placements in the FT or Bloomberg still move the needle — but audiences are migrating to YouTube (now the second-biggest search engine on earth as well as a primary news destination) and the most defensible journalism is depth and analysis, not breaking news. If your firm isn’t producing original video — analysis, commentary, the thinking behind the decisions — and isn’t putting your executives on camera, you are increasingly invisible to a growing share of buyers, allocators and prospective hires.
✅ Build a YouTube channel that does what Sky News has belatedly recognised it must: depth and analysis, not corporate self-congratulation cut into short clips. Put your executives on camera in a format that suits the platform — considered, evidence-based, willing to say something that wouldn’t already appear in a competitor’s deck.
WILDCARD
How to nail your next media interview
⑥ Skimping on media training is one of the more expensive false economies.
🚨 Most people over-prepare talking points and under-prepare judgement — the real-time decisions about what to emphasise, what to leave out, and how an answer will land. There are three interview challenges every leader faces: credibility (”why you?”), positioning (”where are you headed?”), and crisis (”can we trust you?”), and research shows more than three quarters of Americans say a CEO’s reputation influences their decision to invest in a company.
💡 For financial services, the stakes are higher still. A clumsy quote from a tech founder is embarrassing; a clumsy quote from a bank CEO can move a share price, invite regulator attention, or rattle depositors. Yet most senior bankers and fintech founders I’ve prepared for media over the years arrive with the same flawed assumption: that the interview is the event. It isn’t. It’s a single moment on a curve of scrutiny now running continuously across earnings calls, podcasts, panels, and LinkedIn. Only doing media training once a year is one of the more expensive false economies in our sector.
✅ Stop outsourcing media readiness to your PR agency once a year. Build it into how the executive team operates: a message house your spokespeople actually use, quarterly pressure-testing on the questions you don’t want to answer, and a standing inner cabinet of Comms, Legal, and Investor Relations debriefing every public appearance. The goal is not perfect wording — it’s the muscle memory to make sound decisions when the camera is rolling and the question is harder than you expected.
✂️ Off cuts
The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
🤩 How Revolut became a verb — if not yet a lender
🟰 Monzo lost one current account switcher for every two gained in 2025
👍🏻 How to capitalise on London’s thriving financial industry
🔻 Lloyds shares drop after income upgrade on higher interest rates
🇬🇧 JP Morgan shifts Paris jobs back to London in Brexit shake-up
TECHNOLOGY
🤖 AI is a tool that will bring the most benefit to well-trained bankers
🖥️ The Bloomberg Terminal is getting an AI makeover, like it or not
💸 FIS releases digital money package
🦾 Lloyds in tie-up with Google to build AI agents
🪙 Visa stablecoin settlement hits $7 billion run rate
MEDIA & MARKETING
🪄 CMOs tread line between maths and magic
📣 From Sibos: The story behind Finastra’s award-winning B2B social campaign
🚛 Your marketing automation isn’t broken, it’s overloaded
🙅🏻♂️ X introduces rebuilt AI-powered ad platform
🎬 Divine, a Jack Dorsey-backed revival of Vine, is now available on the App Store
🎤 The last word
⑦ Gemma Livermore on why digital banks are outpacing wealth managers:
“Heritage and expertise still matter. But they’re insufficient on their own. For the next generation of clients, trust is moving from something earned through reputation to something demonstrated through experience and outcomes.”
Don’t settle for marketing.
Aspire to InMarketing.
Wishing you an influential week,
P.S. The best writing is short, simple and hits you like a freight train.