Issue № 91 | London, Sunday 31 March 2024
🐣 Happy Easter Sunday, my friend. I’m no bunny but I do have an email chock-full of treats for you. Read on to learn why:
① You brand is defined by every single interaction anyone has with you.
② Your messaging is worthless unless you embody it.
③ Financial brands can no longer eschew compliance when affiliate marketing.
④ Funds are being tokenised and will be on public permissioned blockchains.
⑤ Advertising’s next challenge is persuading consumers to offer up their IDs.
⑥ Pace, not perfection, is the key to unlocking growth.
⑦ Great marketing tells stories.
What's new
Digital asset firm Copper1 threw a party. It was….ill-advised.
In short:
“The cryptocurrency company chaired by former UK chancellor Lord Philip Hammond hosted a party where guests were served sushi off two scantily clad models, raising new questions about the culture of the industry. Copper, which stores digital assets for customers, held the private party last week at the five-star Mandrake hotel in London after a large crypto industry conference.”
“In a dining room with red-lacquered walls, two people who appeared to be wearing thin bodysuits lay on a long table with plates of sushi on their partially naked bodies, according to a photo of the event seen by the FT. ‘Transcend the ordinary at the Copper experience,’ read an invitation for the after-party, adding: ‘Attendees will be able to entertain and explore all five senses’.”
“Copper describes itself as ‘committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and skills’, adding that ‘the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be’. […] ‘We set the institutional standards for digital assets,’ the company says on its LinkedIn page.”
Why it matters
Where do we begin with this fishy tale? I feel nauseous just reading about it. It’s hard to imagine how anyone involved wanted to be. Not the event organisers, not the Copper staff, certainly not the models covered in sushi, and - perhaps most importantly from a marketer’s perspective - not the poor unsuspecting guests. How was this manifestly terrible idea ever signed off in the first place? This shambles matters because it illustrates two important marketing principles.
① The first is that you don’t get to say what your brand is. You only get to influence how people perceive it. That means your brand is much more than your logo, or your tagline, or the words on your website. It is those things, of course, but it’s also every single interaction people have with you. That includes events you host. They’re the physical manifestation of your brand and should reflect all of its positioning and values. If you want to be known as the crazy counterculture champions of crypto, by all means serve fish on naked people. But, if your target audience is regulated financial institutions, you might want to rethink that.
② The second, closely related to the first, is how important consistency and demonstration are to your brand image. To put it differently, your messaging is worthless unless you embody it, unless your actions match your words. If you claim to value diversity and inclusion, steer clear of objectifying people. If you say you take institutional standards seriously, demonstrate an understanding of the policies that bind institutional clients.
What to do about it
Take action
When you get back to the office after the Easter break, why not use the short week to do an audit of your marketing channels?
Renew your positioning: Does your messaging make clear what you stand for? Is it still an accurate description of your unique value proposition?
Review your execution: Are your tactics - whether in PR, social media, events, or paid advertising - consistent with your positioning? Does your staff embody it?
Survey your staff: Do they understand how to convey your positioning? Are they comfortable with how your brand is manifesting across all channels?
Get help
🐣 I told you I had treats for you this week! You’re the first to gain access to my revamped marketing resource hub: InMarketing. I’m curating a dynamic repository of ideas, insights and other help. Have a browse, then please hit reply on this email and let me know what you think.
Help others
If you found this email useful or know someone who would, please share it. Every time you do, it helps me grow the community of regular IMTW readers.
Top stories
The other articles that are worthy of your time.
FINANCE
FCA clamps down on 'finfluencers' hiding financial risks in their content
③ Financial brands can no longer eschew compliance when affiliate marketing via social media influencers.
“The Financial Conduct Authority has issued new rules to clamp down on financial influencers hiding the risks of the products they’re promoting. The FCA laid out details on how finfluencers and companies on social media should be appropriately including the risks of the products they’re promoting, while also not exaggerating their potential gains.”
“Nearly 80 per cent of millennials and Gen Z have used social media to source financial advice, while 43 per cent of Gen Z believe they can source good financial advice on social media, according to a survey from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme last year.”
“The new regulations apply to general financial advice and product promotion, with crypto advertising falling under more detailed rules that came into place in January. […] Affiliate marketing, where a company pays a finfluencer to promote their products, is a huge area, and the FCA warned that ‘the firm would be liable for the compliance of that financial promotion’, even if made by the affiliate.”
TECHNOLOGY
UK fund tokenisation report
④ Funds are being tokenised and will be on public permissioned blockchains.
“The UK’s Investment Association published a second report for the Technology Working Group of the Government’s Asset Management Taskforce. Its first report outlined a baseline for what is achievable for fund tokenisation within the current regulatory framework. The second report specifies two use cases that the industry will trial.”
“First off is the potential to tokenise money market funds. Investors are interested in using tokenized MMFs as collateral, particularly for non-centrally cleared derivatives. The report notes they are generally not currently used as collateral, probably due to settlement delays.”
“The second use case will explore incorporating digital or tokenised securities within a tokenised fund, similar to the Schroders experiment. This use case might become part of the UK’s Digital Securities Sandbox . A key goal is to explore what regulatory changes are necessary for that kind of investment, which is the main purpose of the DSS.”
“The latest report states, ‘The Group recognises that in the future it is likely there will be a mixture of market infrastructure, including both public and private chains – much like the mixture of trading venues today’.”
MEDIA & MARKETING
Meet the digital David taking on the Google Goliath
⑤ Advertising’s next challenge is persuading consumers to offer up their IDs.
“Jeff Green […] is head of a digital-advertising platform, The Trade Desk. Its market value of $42bn is only slightly less than the combined worth of two of the most valuable ad agencies, Publicis and Omnicom. In digital advertising, the only firms bigger—albeit much, much bigger—are the Goliaths of big tech.”
“His latest fight is against Google. Following the lead taken three years ago by Apple, maker of the iPhone, this year Google aims to phase out cookies, bits of software code that enable marketers to track consumers digitally across third-party websites and target them with ads. Google’s justification for ending the practice is data privacy. But Mr Green says that is a figleaf, and that Google’s cookie removal benefits its own full-throttled advertising platform at the expense of others.”
“TTD focuses on placing digital ads in auctions across parts of the internet outside the walled gardens of Google, Apple and other tech giants. That means targeting things like streaming-video content (such as Disney+ and Hulu), audio platforms (Spotify) and the news media. It is a lucrative business: TTD charges advertisers a commission, or take rate, of about 20% to target digital ads at scale. But it is a lopsided industry: in round numbers, Mr Green says global ad spending is approaching $1trn. Just $10bn of that, or 1%, went through TTD last year. Google’s revenues, mostly from digital ads, were a stonking $307bn.”
WILDCARD
Why some companies grow amid uncertainty — and others don’t
⑥ Pace, not perfection, is the key to unlocking growth.
“Top performers are unafraid of big change. In the next year, 63% will change their business model significantly, and they are nine times more likely to see a total business model change this year. They view business model change much more positively. When they change, they are 30% more likely to be planning to revamp their capital structure along with operations, geographic footprint, talent model, and so on.”
“Growth and profit leaders are more likely to provide leadership development programs (by 23%), offer networking and professional development opportunities (by 59%), assign employees to cross-functional teams (by 29%), invest in training for growth (by 33%), and upskill employees in the use of technology (by 57%). They also focus more on their personal learning and growth.”
“Leaders are less likely to approach a problem from the standpoint of risk and cost assessment and more likely to look at competitive position and take a crisis-management approach. That is to say, they get out in front of a problem before it mushrooms. They do not boast of their communication or coaching or motivational skills; but they are 43% more likely to take pride in how well they execute, and 83% more likely to say that their biggest strength is energy and willpower.”
The Artificial Intelligence Spotlight 🔦
Business Name Generator: Generate a short, brandable business name.
Wondercraft: Create podcasts, audiobooks, meditations, ads and effortlessly translate your content for a global audience.
Writesonic: Outsmart competitors by decoding their secrets and leveraging trending keywords to boost your organic traffic.
Off cuts
The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.
FINANCE
⏱️ UK to cut stock settlement times from 2027
💶 UBS makes Sergio Ermotti best-paid European bank boss
✂️ NatWest slashes executive team as it prepares for mass share sale
🐦⬛ A new venture by Starling Bank founder? Ann Boden is hiring CTO
🏅 HSBC to launch tokenised gold
TECHNOLOGY
🦾 The power of machine learning in transaction monitoring
🤝 Tokenisation of private markets explored by new partnership
🌐 Swift hails results of CBDC connector testing
🤖 Financial services counting on AI for a productivity boost
⛓️ Euroclear invests in blockchain company
MEDIA & MARKETING
🥰 The role of emotions in financial marketing
📲 LinkedIn targets users caught between TikTok and what used to be Twitter
😬 AI-induced anxiety and SEO volatility among top 10 challenges for marketers
🐦 Should you still use Twitter for B2B marketing?
The last word
⑦ Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, who died this week, on people’s economic decisions:
“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”
Don’t settle for marketing.
Strive for InMarketing.
Wishing you a productive week,
Full disclosure: I worked with Copper’s CEO, Dmitry Tokarev, for a couple of years when he was the chief technology officer at wealth manager Dolfin.