Magnet, not megaphone

In the age of AI, creativity will be marketing's strongest currency.

Andrew Carrier

Jun 08, 2025

Read on to learn why:

① Tactics should pivot quickly, strategy should not.

② You should measure marketing success via lifetime value of a client.

③ If you can price above market, it’s because of the allure of your brand.

④ Marketers have to be customer obsessed.

⑤ A good marketing leader fosters cross-department collaboration.

⑥ The machines are more human than humans.

⑦ Leadership is ultimately about helping others find their gift.

What's new

I attended the EMEA Financial Services Marketing Leaders' Summit 2025 on Wednesday and it was full of thought-provoking moments. So, I thought I’d jettison our usual format this week and focus on bringing you my key takeaways.

The conference was held under the Chatham House Rule and the speakers included Suresh Balaji, Raghavendra Bharadhwaj, Roslyn Casey Shaw, Adrian Coxon, Duarte Garrido, Alison Harbert, Michael Hunter, Nickie McDade, Miranda McLean, Roberto Napolitano, Ruya Niazi, Satwant Pandher Wishart, Gunnar Steven, and Shakeela Williamson.

Suresh Balaji, CMO, Lloyds Banking Group.

Navigating digital transformation

There are about 15,000 marketing tech providers today. “That’s crazy,” exclaimed one of the panelists. But the real obstacle to digital transformation isn’t too much choice but the three hurdles most familiar to anyone who has spent any time in financial services: regulatory (“this must be the only sector where the default answer is ‘no’,”), siloed teams (at best, at worst competing business lines), and legacy systems.

The answer is to lead transformation projects not with technology itself but with customer experience. And buy, don’t build.

Artificial intelligence, of course, is going to be at the heart of many projects. Teams are going to shrink. That’s inevitable. Particularly in smaller companies. But this will also level the playing field. With AI at their side, smaller teams - think 1-5 people - will be able to catch up with larger ones.

AI isn’t great at creativity but it is great at data if you can plug it into the right data. So, build your team with creative people. Don’t worry about channel experience, AI will do that for them.

① While the panel suggested AI would enable ‘vibe marketing’ in financial services - e.g. looking at what people are saying in real time, publishing content about it, and measuring the results all within 24 hours - there was forceful pushback from the audience, with the CMO of a global corporate bank making the point that, even though AI can take over our thinking, we shouldn’t let it. The currency of marketing is creativity, based on insights, experience and knowledge. And reacting day-to-day isn’t a strategy. Tactics should pivot quickly, strategy should not.

What everyone agreed on is that AI is a powerful tool that works best when creatives are at the helm.

How do you measure success?

Measuring success, to the degree that it’s possible at all, demands first understanding your stakeholders. How do they think about marketing? What resonates with them? Forget vanity KPIs, ultimately, it’s about contributing to the commercial success of the business.

In so doing, there is a distinction between where marketing ‘wins’ and where it simply ‘assists’. Most marketing activity falls in the latter category. And, as someone in the audience pointed out, sales and marketing are not the only two functions that influence a buying decision. Every single touch point influences customers.

② So, perhaps the most powerful way to measure marketing success is via lifetime value of a client who has come in via direct marketing channels.

Of course, a tangible metric like that should be considered alongside less tangible ones: brand recognition, trust, net promoter score. That’s where brand rather than demand generation activities contribute to success.

③ For example, 95% of people who see an ad aren’t in the market. But you have to plant seeds for when they are. And when your CFO questions why you’re spending money on brand building, explain price premium to her: if you can price above market, it’s because of the allure of your brand. That’s where we all want our brand to be.

As ever, perhaps the hardest challenge is attribution. When Dyson launches a new ad, they see impact in days. In B2B financial services, it can take 18 months.

What it comes down to is measuring the important metrics - lifetime value and share of searches were the panel’s favourite 0 and trying them to a 360 degree view of customer touch points. The days of direct attribution are dead.

Building the right team, the right way

Diversity, of course. But perhaps the most important characteristics of a high-performing teams is culture fit. Skills can be taught but people need to align with the culture or it simply won’t work. So, when hiring, be sure to put candidates in front of as many members of your team as practicable. It’s a vital chemistry test on both sides.

Other than that, the panel highlighted curiosity, proactivity, emotional intelligence, agility, and being comfortable when challenged as valuable traits.

As a leader, the more senior you are, the more your role is ultimately about removing obstacles for your team. Charles Handy agrees (see the last word below).

Senior leadership is a new role: what got you here, won’t get you there.

Achieving true audience centricity in financial services marketing

Perhaps the most important session of the day. Client centricity is no longer a noble mission; everyone now understands it’s critical.

④ Marketers have to be customer obsessed. That goes even for internal functions. From a marketing perspective, we have to be one step ahead of the competition, including fintechs.

How to do it? It starts with data - but with a view to talking to a human being. The key is understanding the needs of our customers - their pain points, their aspirations - then removing our own internal complexities - or at least hiding them from our customers. Global consistency matters, of course, but cultural and contextual relevance is crucial. With reliable and relevant data, we can create campaigns that reach the right audiences and maximise ROI.

⑤ A good marketing leader doesn’t just drive results but also fosters cross-department collaboration. That’s because a good marketing leader should be the loudest internal voice of the customer and their interests.

Brand building: Balancing brand and product

Don’t worry too much about balancing brand and product. Big sporting event sponsorship can sit alongside product-driven initiatives. Performance partnerships are going to support your brand and vice versa - even if those expensive sporting sponsorships are determined by the passion of a senior executive. Choose your battles.

The critical element of brand building is understanding your customer. When it comes to local activation, for example, it pays to know which sport is huge there. It may be a cheaper sponsor than you expect and pay back in spades.

Marketing to the machines

As someone who loves writing myself and worships the better writing of others, I feared the worse as we started this session being told that because people are increasingly turning to AI rather than search, marketers now need to optimise content for large language models. Organic search traffic is expected to decrease by 50% by 2028. So, we need to be marketing to the machines as well as human beings.

⑥ I needn’t have worried though because, in some ways, the machines are more human than humans. That’s because they look for EEAC: experiences (case studies, process explainers), expertise (specialist knowledge), authority (proof that others trust what you say - such as mentions in the earned press), and trust (well-sources, fact-checked, topical content - white papers create a 35% uplift in visibility to LLMs apparently.) In short, it seems the machines operate like humans used to before smartphones sapped them of their attention spans. They seek out authoritative, long-form content with substance. Music to this marketer’s ears. The 2010s called, they want their content marketing best-practice back.

So, of course continue to produce 7 second TikTok videos - those zombie scrolling humans love them - but remember to publish substance and transcripts too so the machines can digest them.

Where to start? With an audit. Then invest in the platforms you control. Your website should be your content hub. Publish long-form content and bylined articles from your experts. Be prepared for a fall in human traffic. That’s the price you pay. And remember to mesure mentions from the AIs.

One final nugget: in the age of AI, real-life, small, targeted events can pay dividends.

Route to revenue

An interview with Suresh Balaji, CMO, Lloyds Banking Group concluded the event. Like so many who have scaled to the pinnacle of their profession, Balaji was quietly confident, self-effacing, joyful, grateful, and deeply respectful of the contributions of his team. He was a delight to listen to. Some gems:

“If you’re offered a role where you’re not helping to transform an organisation, don’t take it.”
“Customer insight and creativity are the two great levers.”
“The clue is in the word: marketing is about the market. Get out there.”
“Constraint leads to creativity. Massive budgets lead to hubris.”
“Marketing is the only function that gets express permission to be creative. Use it.”
“Red Bull doesn’t actually give you wings. Hyperbole is okay.”
“Be creative, beat the door down with ideas. But always to solve a business problem.”
“We don’t have a marketing strategy. Marketing is a lever to help deliver the business strategy.”
“Carefully think through: How do you create economic value?”
“Go from ‘+AI’ to ‘AI+’. We used to add AI later. Now we do a lot of things with AI at the heart of them.”
“My values are curiosity, courage and kindness.”
“To be a marketer, you have to be a salesperson. Stakeholders look to you to bring the wonder. Can you bring magic to the table?”
“Marketing is part science, part smart ass.”

What to do about it

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