Financial Intermediaries: A Study in Crisis and Contradiction
 
Agency PARTNERS+simons sought to better understand how advisors were faring in a climate that is both challenging and forever changed. The agency fielded a study designed to provide insight into evolving client expectations, the impact on client relationships and the resulting implications to providers of financial products.
 
P+s findings confirmed that the world of the advisor has been altered, yet the response from providers of financial products hasn’t hit the mark. Advisors applaud the proactive communications efforts of providers, however they expressed deep frustration that there hasn’t been any true substantive help where it matters most– the ability to grow their business with solutions, not just products, that meet the needs of a changed clientele. Most of all, advisors want providers of financial products to demonstrate they understand that advisors are business people looking to better manage and grow their businesses, not simple sales people pitching products. 
 
Advice – More Important Than Ever
While Wall Street is maligned in the media, financial advisors have not experienced a similar public backlash. In fact, a significant majority of advisors (88%) have experienced an increase or no change in interest in working with them. However, even as interest in working with an advisor is increasing, advisors are being challenged to meet the changed expectations of a new type of client, one who expects to be more engaged than ever in the planning process.
 
Implications:
Advisors fared better than other financial professionals during the economic downturn, retaining clients and even seeing increased interest from new clients. The change in client expectations, however, has had significant ramifications to how an advisor works with clients and meets the new demands placed upon them.
 
The Value of the Advisor
Advisors agreed that the most important value they bring to clients is a sense of security and knowledge that an advisor is looking out for them (96%), the ability to simplify complex investment and financial planning topics (94%), the ability to provide expertise to guide decisions (94%), help clients be more comprehensive in their planning to achieve financial and lifestyle goals (94%), and bring discipline to a client’s financial planning (94%).
 
When viewed in aggregate, advisors prioritized the emotional value a client receives from working with an advisor – the sense of expert guidance and oversight from someone who has a vested interest in helping them achieve their financial goals - above the rational benefits of working with an advisor. The more rational value a client receives included helping clients be more comprehensive in their planning (92%), developing alternative recommendations for clients to consider (90), frequent monitoring and evaluations of client investment strategies (88%) and evaluating and providing comparative investment performance (86%).
 
Implications:
Advisors believe that clients value their advisor relationship more than ever. The fact that advisors emerged from the economic downturn essentially unscathed in the eyes of their clients, and are even sought after by prospective clients, further enforces this point. Clients acknowledged that everyone seemed to suffer during the economic downturn, however having an advisor on their side helped to alleviate some of the anxiety and potentially insulated them from even greater losses.

Because advisors view their client relationships holistically, providers who offer merely “products,” rather than ways an advisor can add value to client relationships, are missing an opportunity – and may well be left behind all together.

 
Today’s Clients: I want MORE
The majority of respondents (59%) agreed that client expectations have changed as a result of the economic turmoil. Advisors overwhelmingly believe that clients are taking investing and savings decisions more seriously (90%), taking more time before making investment decisions (88%) and want more information before making investment decisions (88%). Clients also want more frequent communication (82%) and more information about the products they’re investing in (80%).
 
Implications:

More serious decisions. More information requirements. More frequent communications. When clients want “more,” advisors must spend more time meeting their needs. Add to that longer decision-making cycles as clients spend more time evaluating their options, and advisors are feeling the crunch. 

According to a Financial Times study, advisors already spend the bulk of their time (43%) servicing existing clients and a mere quarter of their time researching/picking investments and staying abreast of the market. With even more demands on their time from clients, and potentially more clients to serve, advisors will have even less time to evaluate new providers and products.
 
Likewise, providers will have even fewer opportunities to gain mindshare among advisors, and with time at a premium, advisors will be seeking to partner only with those providers who deliver added value to their client relationships.
 
 

Changing Expectations and Provider Relationships

Changes in client expectations have impacted advisors’ relationships with providers, with 86 percent of advisors paying closer attention to fees, 67 percent limiting providers to a smaller, trusted set, and the majority re-evaluating both products (67%) and firms (62%). Only 14 percent of advisors actually sought to increase the number of providers they worked with during the economic downturn.

Yet even though advisors agree that clients’ expectations have changed and there is increased interest in working with advisors, oddly those changes have not impacted how advisors work with providers (59%).
 
Advisors still feel that providers are too product-centric, relying on new, more conservative products as quick fixes to client needs rather than addressing the substantive changes they’re demanding. While providers responded to new economic realities with more proactive communication and new products, the response wasn’t viewed as helping where it counts – the advisor’s ability to grow and manage a business. 
 
Implications:
Given the performance of investments, clients are questioning the fees associated with products offered via advisors. In turn, advisors are re-evaluating their selected providers, seeking to address client concerns about fees without performance, and their own need to partner with providers who can help them grow their business.
 
Advisors view the current climate as an opportunity to identify key providers who want to be true partners rather than product vendors. Advisors want providers who recognize that they’re not simply sales people but rather business people who want to grow their businesses while satisfying current client needs.
 
Getting To the Table, And Staying There
Every study respondent agreed that a reputation for being trustworthy was most important when selecting a financial services provider (100%). Long term stability (98%), competitive fees (96%) and clear investment objectives (96%) were also overwhelmingly cited as important. * Does this assume performance? No.

But those are just the table stakes to even be in the consideration set in the first place. Once a provider meets those criteria, they have an opportunity to truly differentiate themselves through proactive communication addressing their response to the changed investment environment (88%), providing tools to help take clients through investment options (88%) and materials to help clients educate themselves about products/providers (84%), and on-line access to tools and information that clients can use to understand investments and investment options (82%).

 

Implications:

The uncertain economic landscape provided a testing ground for many providers. Advisors had an opportunity to see providers at their best and their worst, and as a result advisors are making decisions more thoughtfully than ever. Advisors are gravitating toward the providers who exhibited a commitment to transparent communications, clarity of message and innovation in meeting client needs. They want partners who offer actionable business ideas and support and less product pushing and marketing spin.
 
It’s no longer enough to be a company with a long history in the industry, but rather how a company responded during a time of crisis and what they’re doing to help advisors and their clients moving forward.
 
Conclusion
The world of the intermediary has changed. Clients are demanding more – time, communication, and education. But even as clients have raised expectations for the level of service and engagement they want to receive from advisors, advisors must determine how to provide that service given all that they have to do.
 
One area they’re looking to for greater efficiency is their provider relationships. Advisors have responded by choosing to work with fewer providers – those providers who show a true understanding and meet their clients’ needs and business requirements. They will choose partners who are committed to helping them build a business versus those simply looking for salespeople to push their products.
 
With client expectations permanently and fundamentally recast, advisors see an opportunity to reshape their provider relationships as well. A successful relationship will be one where a provider of financial products is able to create a new value chain by working together with advisors to meet the needs of clients. 
 
About the Study
In the first quarter of 2010, PARTNERS+simons conducted an online survey with a national sample of financial advisors. The sample included a mix of independent advisors and those who worked for firms. Advisors had to have a minimum of two years experience as financial planners, with the majority of the sample having more than 11 years of experience.
 

Jennifer O’Connell is the Director, Financial Services for PARTNERS+simons, a full-service communications agency located in Boston. You can contact Jennifer at jennifero@partnersandsimons.com.

 
The financial services industry has undergone dramatic changes since the global downturn in financial markets in October, 2008. Some of the world’s most highly‐regarded firms have stumbled ‐ if not fallen – and those that remain scramble to restore trust, confidence and value to their brands. How marketers at today’s leading financial firms respond to these changes is being sorted out at this moment.
 On a separate track, the evolution toward new media channels and digital marketing models has been accelerated. Leading firms are being challenged to develop more sophisticated digital marketing strategies and to efficiently organize resources to execute these strategies. In addition, senior management is adopting a more prominent role in ensuring the proper development of the firm’s reputation and in measuring a return on its investment in marketing.
 
Thus, there is a need to identify best practices that can be employed by financial marketers today to win in this new, digital world. The Gramercy Institute in partnership with Northwestern University and Brand New Media, LLC is conducting an in‐depth, study on “Best Practices in Digital Marketing of Financial Services” over the summer of 2010. The study will help participating financial firms rationalize their investment in digital marketing and media as well as to how to best organize their digital marketing resources.
 
 
An opportunity exists for 6 or so leading financial services marketers to participate in this in‐depth “Best Practices in Digital Marketing of Financial Services.” We are referring to these participating financial marketers as our “Digital Marketing Leadership Council” (or, DMLC). “The Study” is designed to drill deep into the digital marketing practices of each of these financial marketer participant companies to empower marketers at these firms to better understand a) how their practices meet overarching marketing objectives at their own firms, b) how their practices measure‐up against those of other leading financial marketers, c) what digital marketing risks and opportunities may exist for their own and other financial services firms. Moreover, these financial marketers (DMLC participants) will be offered a platform to showcase their leadership as they set a standard for excellence and best practices in digital financial marketing.
 
DMLC members will receive deliverables in three specific areas. Each company will receive: a) a customized in‐depth analysis/briefing, focused on the digital marketing practices and opportunities at their own specific firms, b) a comparative in‐depth analysis of their own practices compared to those of the other leading financial services marketers participating and c) citation of participant companies for their leadership in the financial services marketing community, at large.
 

RESEARCH DESCRIPTION:Best Practices in Digital Marketing of Financial Services

The Gramercy Institute in partnership with Northwestern University and Brand New Media Group will be conducting an extensive research study on Best Practices in Digital Marketing of Financial Services. The Study will have both qualitative and quantitative components.

 
Study Objective
To help participating (DMLC) financial services companies to understand and identify:
 
·         How companies can be optimally organized for digital marketing initiatives
·         How to best select and manage agency and marketing partners for digital marketing initiatives
·         Identify best‐in‐class processes and procedures for developing and executing digital marketing initiatives
·         Identify spending trends on digital media and marketing
·         Identify current and developing metrics for measuring success and ROI of digital marketing
·         Provide a forecast of digital marketing for participating companies
 
Methodology
·         Primary Research
o   Qualitative: Frank Mulhern, Associate Dean of Research at Northwestern University, Frank Dudley, CEO, Brand New Media Group, and four graduate students at Northwestern University will conduct in‐person interviews at financial marketer firms. Confidentiality will be strictly maintained and the final qualitative deliverable will be scrubbed of all names delivered to each DMLC participant company. Interviews may also be conducted with select agency and marketing partner companies in order to get a full picture of how digital marketing is executed within and for these client companies. The qualitative interviews will be consistent so that responses can be benchmarked and inform a unified quantitative survey instrument.
 
o   Quantitative: Separately, a survey of senior marketing professionals at financial services companies will be conducted and analyzed. The survey will be informed by the issues and best practices that are identified via the qualitative component of The Study. The quantitative study results will then be analyzed in light of the qualitative study results.
 

·         Secondary Research

Frank Mulhern, Associate Dean of Research at Northwestern University, Frank Dudley, CEO, Brand New Media Group, and four graduate students at Northwestern University will conduct extensive secondary research of digital marketing in financial services. This research will be used to inform the primary research component of The Study.
 
PARTICIPATION COSTS:
Opportunity exists for up to six-eight leading financial marketers to participate in this important study.  Participants become members of The Digital Marketing Leadership Council (DMLC) and receive benefits outlined below.  The participation cost is $25K per financial marketer.

In addition, a limited number of opportunies exist for agency and media sponsorship of the study.

 

DELIVERABLES
Deliverable (Customized) to Each Financial Marketer (DMLC) Participants:

A final deliverable in the form of:

 
·         Specific recommendations along with key takeaways relevant to each financial marketer (DMLC) participant will be offered in a special (individual) briefing with each financial marketer participant.
·         A digital version will be given to financial marketer participants in PDF format.
·         A PowerPoint deliverable will accompany The Study for each of the financial marketer participants, customized for each financial marketer participant.
·         Twenty copies of a generic printed study will be provided to all financial marketer participant companies ($20K cover price value) for distribution to team members, partners and stakeholders.
 
Deliverable (Comparative) to Financial Marketer (DMLC) Participants:
 
A final deliverable in the form of:
 
·         A detailed comparative analysis of fellow DMLC participants will be offered to each financial marketer participant, outlining leading best practices amongst studied subjects. No confidential information will be shared in this comparative assessment.
·         Results from a survey of leading financial marketers will be analyzed in conjunction with The Study and shared with participants to offer breadth to The Study and directional trends and leanings.
·         Financial marketer participants will be (collectively) invited to an optional special “unveiling” of the research at The Ritz Carlton Hotel on December 2, 2010 in San Francisco.
 
Deliverable (Community) to Financial Marketing (DMLC) Participants:
 
·         Financial marketer participants will cited for their leadership role in this study and, by extension, in the financial marketing community at large. A top‐line generic version of this study (scrubbed of names) will be distributed to the financial marketing industry at large to indicate trends and directions identified in The Study.
·         News releases will be distributed to key members of the press upon publishing.
·         The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing will cover multiple aspects of The Study in articles.
·         A generic and top line version (no proprietary secrets shared) of The Study will be presented to numerous leaders in the financial services marketing community through various Financial Marketers’ Alliance and JFAM conferences and summits. Financial marketer participant companies will be recognized for their leadership roles.
·         A generic and top‐line version of The Study, indicating trends on the subject will be made available to the financial services marketing community at large (cover price $1,000 per copy). DMLC participant companies will be recognized for leadership role in printed copies.
 
Projected Timeline
·         The Study is to be conducted over the summer of 2010 (June, July and August). The Study and all deliverables will be completed by October 15, 2010.

 

 

BEHIND THE STUDY:

The Study is organized by Bill Wreaks, CEO of The Gramercy Institute, in partnership with Frank Dudley, CEO of Brand New Media Group and Frank Mulhern, Associate Dean of Research at Northwestern University.

 About The Gramercy Institute
The Gramercy Institute specializes in issues surrounding financial services marketing. The company publishes The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing, a professional journal devoted to sharing expert opinions in and about the financial marketing industry. The company also directs The Financial Marketers’ Alliance, a network of over 1100 senior financial marketing professionals, worldwide. Annually, the FMA produces numerous thought leadership conferences in financial services marketing, including The JFAM Financial Marketers’ Summit: EAST in Philadelphia, The JFAM Financial Marketers’ Summit: WEST in San Francisco, JFAM: Live! Financial Marketing Conference in New York City (semi‐annually), The JFAM Strategic Philanthropy Awards and The JFAM Media Strategy Awards. The FMA regularly hosts panel discussions and roundtables in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and London. GI clients include dozens of the world’s leading financial, media and agency brands.
 
About Brand New Media Group
 Brand New Media Group, LLC, is a world class market research company focused on developing and executing best practices research for senior level marketers. The company is managed by Frank Dudley, former VP of Marketing of Guideline/Opinion Research Corporation and the first Director of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). Mr. Dudley is a prolific speaker and author of research studies on topics ranging from marketing management and marketing accountability to brand building, integrated marketing and digital marketing and media. Mr. Dudley has most recently developed and authored many such research studies in partnership with the ANA, the PMA and Northwestern University since 2004.
 
For More Information:

 For more information regarding our “Best Practices in Digital Marketing of Financial Services” study or joining us as one of our members companies of our Digital Marketing Leadership Council, contact: Bill Wreaks, Chief Executive Officer, The Gramercy Institute, (212) 753‐5131, bill@financialadvertising.com

 (OPTIONAL) PANEL CONFERENCE CALL DATE/TIME:  5:00 PM (East Coast Time), Thursday, April 29th , Access Number: 1.404.920.6777, Participant Code: 48467635#  
 

PANEL:  “The Changing Role of Content in Financial Marketing”   
                  
Thank you for joining us at The JFAM Financial Marketers' Summit: EAST (May 5-7) at The Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia.
 
Also, thank you very much for agreeing to serve on this panel.  Please see the agenda for the specific time of your panel (and specifically who will be joining you on the panel).
So you know, there is no deep preparation that is needed for this panel.  I do encourage you to take a look at this (see below) list of "Questions to Ponder" for this particular panel.  Also, there will be an (optional) conference call prior to the summit if you would like to join for it.  It has been set up as a way for fellow panelists to chat and share ideas on the direction and coverage of the panel.  The specific time/date of this conference call is listed at the very top of this page.
 
I will be moderating the panel…and, to begin with, I will be asking each one of you to take 2 minutes to offer a bit about your background and what you do, specifically as it might relate to this particular topic. 

 

Following this, I will be asking the panel a few questions on the subject of this topic (questions below). We will not get to all questions, and they will take a more conversational format than me simply asking you these questions one-by-one, but for the most part, these questions (below) will embody the essence of our conversation.
 
Following this, we will also open it up to questions from the floor.  The panel should last about 40 minutes, total. Obviously, if there is any problem with any of these questions—no prob. Just let me know.
 
Questions to Ponder:
 
·         What has changed recently with respect to “content” in financial marketing today? What do you feel has brought about this change—new marketer demands? Or structural changes on the media side? Or something else?
·         In light of any change, what new opportunities are popping up for financial marketers today that might not have been available, say five years ago?
·         Has the line between editorial and advertising become more blurry in the past few years? If so, what’s the argument that this blurrier line is a good thing for financial marketers? What’s the argument that a blurrier line is not a good thing for financial marketers?
·         Why are so many trusted magazine brands having trouble making ends meet? What’s not working? Is it that trust in the independent magazine title is not as important to financial consumers—or is that magazines are victims of logistical inefficiencies? Or something else?
·         What are some newer media brands that have popped in the financial services space that are offering more options to financial marketers?  What makes their propositions attractive?
·         Do marketers need   independent media brands the way they used to? Has custom publishing become looked at more favorably in the eyes of media consumers in recent years?
·         What best cases come to mind in which we see financial marketers serving up relevant content directly to their customers without an established media brand in the middle?
·         Trust is a critical term today in financial services marketing—how has the role of content changed in the past few years in financial services marketing. 
·         How has technology facilitated changed in content within financial marketing?

·         How can social media best be tapped to deliver marketing value to financial services marketers? 

·         Can you share some examples of financial services companies doing it right when it comes to tapping the marketing power of some of these newer content platforms.
 

One final point, this list of questions has been set up to be interactive for our panel.  If you care to add a comment or suggestion for all on our panel to see/respond to, please feel free to do so below.

 

(OPTIONAL) PANEL CONFERENCE CALL DATE/TIME:  5:00 PM (East Coast Time), Thursday, April 29th , Access Number: 1.404.920.6777, Participant Code: 48467635#  

 

 

In the serious world of financial advertising, the Levinson Tractenberg Group in New York City has taken a chance with humor and discovered an opportunity.

The ad agency has developed several witty ad campaigns in what would otherwise be considered a sober domain. For one thing, there is the ad for Chubb Group of Insurance Companies in which a woman with a picnic basket waves a red blanket in the wind, unaware of the hard-charging bull in the distance. The picture is accompanied by the slogan, “Who insures you doesn’t matter, until it does.” 

It is similar to the campaign the same company designed for the New York City personal injury law firm Trolman, Glaser & Lichtman, in which a stern-looking woman complains about the horrible injury she has suffered. The viewer hears about the machete-like pain she is feeling. Then she reveals that the injury is nothing more than a little paper cut and shows the Band-Aid on her finger as proof. “They made that paper way too sharp. Someone has to pay,” she exclaims.The voiceover then states: “If you’ve been injured, call us. But keep in mind, you need to really be injured.”

Whether it is an ad for insurance companies or attorneys, there is a need for humor, according to Joel Tractenberg, a partner at the Levinson Tractenberg Group. Most of the ads in those sectors are serious, but it is also important to find something to laugh about.

“We like to go the opposite way as long as it fits the brand,” says Tractenberg about his firm’s philosophy. “We don’t want to be silly or goofy. We want to be tasteful.”

In these times of economic uncertainty especially, people need a reason to smile.

“We have to have a sense of humor, otherwise we would be in trouble,” says Tractenberg. “We need a sense of optimism.”

But just because auto insurance companies, such as Progressive Insurance, use comedy, it does not mean that it is appropriate for every finserv company. Banks, for example, are less apt to use it. With all the trouble they have been having recently, it simply would not be as effective, according to Jon Swallen, senior vice president for research at Kantar Media in New York. 

“Humor is more difficult with banks, if not outright ill-advised. Auto insurance is unique, though, because every licensed driver is in the market,” Swallen says. “It is a commodity you have to buy, although you hope you never have to use it.”

Banks and investment firms, though, tend to use ads that deliver a more straight forward and sober message. The TD Ameritrade ads with Sam Waterston are a good example of that.

“You wouldn’t want to get a funny message from Goldman Sachs right now,” states Jonathan Schoenberg, creative director for TDA in Boulder, Col. TDA is the advertising firm that created the ad series for FirstBank.

“Banks have been acting like monarchies for a long time,” he continues. “You used to wear a tie to go into a bank. You don’t have that same relationship any more.”

The objectives of the two different sectors are not the same, according to Swallen. Insurance ads are mainly targeted toward name recognition and lead generation.

“We want to get people to take the first step and be aware of the brand,” he says.

Much insurance marketing is directed toward selling policies with the lowest price, as if that were the customer’s only concern. GEICO and Progressive are certainly instrumental in that category.

“It is a question of how you can stand out and build awareness and brand recognition,” Swallen adds.

It is debatable, however, whether a funny ad packs enough information for the customer to understand the product. While some ads are built only for a laugh and the name recognition that comes with it, others such as the new Nationwide campaign, do include enough content to tell people about things such as the vanishing deductible and discount finder.

Those messages are communicated by a new character known as the “The World’s Greatest Spokesperson in the World,” which replaces the “Life Comes at You Fast” ads. He is a man who has supposedly retired to the deep woods, but is coerced out of seclusion to work with Nationwide to promote their new programs.

“Our tongue is firmly planted in cheek,” comments Brad Brinegar, chairman and CEO of McKinney of Durham, N.C., the agency that created the campaign. Although the tone is definitely funny, it comes complete with plenty of information, including its long-held slogan: “Nationwide is on your side.”

Although he could be characterized as goofy, the “Spokesperson” makes it a point to explain to a customer on the ad that vanishing deductibles will “take one hundred dollars off for every year she does not have an accident.”

It is the first time Nationwide has used a recurring character in an ad campaign.

“Nationwide is taking a different tack,” Brinegar continues. “We’re not preaching from the mouth. This is more than just paying premiums and getting the lowest price. It is more of a proactive experience. ‘On your side’ means a proactive customer experience.”

Executives at Nationwide realized that this is a good strategy for them to take.

“As we thought about our new campaign, we knew we needed someone special – an advocate for our customers,” said Steven Schreibman, vice president of advertising and brand management for Nationwide. 

“McKinney is reinventing the conversation between consumers and brands,” Brinegar says. “With financial advertising, you have to engage the people. It’s a dry category. People have a hard time understanding it.” Automobile insurance may be more apt to utilize humor because people have to buy it. State laws throughout the country dictate that they cannot choose not to, he adds.

“Humor was very ripe for Nationwide. We have taken several months to look at the execution and we have the research to validate it,” Brinegar continues. The campaign has been designed to appear on television, direct response TV, online and search engines. Several segments that have not appeared on the air can be seen online. Those on DRTV are longer so they have more information. They first appeared on Feb. 12 during the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics and later that same weekend on the broadcast of the Daytona 500. McKinney became Nationwide’s advertising agency of record in the middle of 2009.
 
*     *     *

 

There are plenty of amusing financial ads on the air and in print. Some are so familiar they are almost cliche. Others are not quite so well known. But they are all representative of what is happening. Refresh your memory with this list:

> Aflac’s duck, which was one of the early financial ads in recent memory to turn to humor (actually, the first one was much earlier when E.F. Hutton developed the slogan “When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen”);

> The frustrated kids just wanting to play on the Ally Bank ads;
> E*Trade’s hysterical talking and singing babies;
> The sparkling singing trio for freecreditreport.com;
> The GEICO cavemen, gekko and stacks of money, all of which are designed to promote different aspects of their coverage (the company spent $625 million on advertising in 2008);
> Progressive’s campaign with Flo, the flighty but good-hearted young saleswoman;

> The dog who worries about his bone until it is safe within reach in the Travelers Insurance ads; and

> The pieces for SunLife in which they want other companies to change their names (for example, from Sun Valley to SunLife Valley).

But take a look on YouTube, where many ads are stored. Bits that are no longer on the air because their company is no longer in business can also be seen there. Such is the case with Washington Mutual, in which a group of executives threatens to jump off a roof en masse. It is purely ironic these days because some of them may have been tempted to do just that when it went under in real life.

Along the same line are the now-tabled ads from AIG in which a little boy gets up in the middle of the night to ask his parents, “Does your retirement plan provide predictability of income and protection against market risk?” to which his parents answer, “We have AIG.” Only then could the lad go back to sleep safe in the knowledge that all was well in his household. The irony here is that if AIG could have predicted its own problems, it still might be in business.

So what makes humor so attractive to financial advertisers?

For some creatives, such as Schoenberg of TDA, it is a classic battle between comedy and tragedy, something dating back all the way to ancient Greek theatre. “Comedy is a nicer way to engage the consumer,” he says. It is also a good way to reach young customers. “The primary tone is serious,” he says. “It (finance) is a serious topic.”

Some finserv companies may feel that these are not the best times to be funny. But FirstBank’s plans were started well before the economic downturn, according to Schoenberg. Part of the problem, he finds, is that so many ads today are geared to communicate messages from advertiser to advertiser, and not to their customers.

“We use humor because it is one of the tools in our tool belt,” says Tractenberg. “Humor can soften a preachy message and you don’t want to be preachy. It’s a great way to break through and make it approachable.” The Chubb ads have received a good response from consumers, he says, and have, in fact, been rated as the No. 1 most-remembered ad in a recent survey.

Of course, one of the stumbling blocks with humor is that what may be funny to some people may not be to someone else.

“Humor takes many forms,” comments Swallen of Kantar Media. “Not every commodity has the same humor to each person.”

“Any brand has to be careful with how they are viewed,” says Brinegar. “Humor can always be used effectively or ineffectively.”

But does all this mean that a trend has been created in finserv advertising? Tractenberg says he doesn’t think so, adding that the primary tone of the sector tends to remain serious. But there is a lot of it on the airwaves, as the list above demonstrates. The trend that Schoenberg sees is that there is increasingly little information found in spots, especially the humorous ones. Compare that with print ads from the 1940s and ’50s in which full pages were filled with small type explaining everything there is to know about the company. The primary task of these ads today is to get people to turn to the firm’s web page, where most of the detailed information can be found.

It is sometimes hard to know what the viewers’ reactions will be, but a study conducted by RoperASW back in 2002 indicated that as many as 85 percent of all respodents said that they “like ads with humorous themes.”

Research about the effectiveness of humorous ads is hard to come by but one study by the University of Florida shows that when Hispanics are split into two groups – Cuban-Americans and Mexican-Americans – and compared, the ones from Mexico prefer funny financial ads. As Jorge Villegas states in his abstract, “This finding suggests that Mexican-Americansmight use affective information, instead of cognitive strategies,to form attitudes toward financial products.”

Schoenberg sums it all up by saying that the most important issue is whether we are just looking at humorous campaigns as such or treating these as proof of us being human. Showing our funny side is a part of that.

“And being human is part of our culture,” he says.

Financial Marketers Agree “Back to Basics” Is Key to Future Success
 
Back to basics and building on sound fundamentals represents the key to the future of financial marketing in 2010.
 
JFAM:Live! Financial Marketers’ Conference took place in New York City in March of 2010 at the Wharton Auditorium of TIAA-CREF.  The conference was attended by over 125 senior financial marketing professionals and was sponsored by the Financial Times, TIAA-CREF and The Wall Street Journal (Platinum), Digo, Gardner Nelson & Partners, Media Contacts, Compete, Inc., PARTNERS + simons, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Vibrant Media  (Gold) and  InvestingChannel (Silver). The conference takes place every six months and is designed for senior marketers from major financial institutions. This was the 11th JFAM:Live! Financial Marketers’ Conference.
 
 Bill Wreaks, Chief Analyst of The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing, opened the conference by explaining that “this conference is focused on what’s next in financial services marketing. There’s no sense in us rehashing how to market financial firms in a down economy. We’re moving out of this great recession. The ice is melting and I am asking us all to examine ‘what it is that do we all do next?’” 
 
By the close of the conference, Wreaks commented that “it seemed like panelists felt that answer to my ‘what’s next?’ question can be found in applying newer strategies to the more traditional fundamentals of financial marketing. Threads such as:
 
·         The value of the customer
·         The power of trust
·         The making of a reputation and
·         Real accountability for results
 
These threads were all underscored time and time again in this day-long series of discussions among leading financial marketing executives.
 
Clearly articulating objectives and methodically analyzing (and optimizing) results were themes that were also woven throughout the day’s agenda. This was not a “convention of catch phrases and buzz words,” says Wreaks. "This conference was about building upon well established marketing fundamentals."
 
Is the ice really melting? Interestingly, financial marketing hiring expert, Tom Jago of The Ward Group pointed out that “interest in hiring smart people is—suddenly--happening in the financial marketing sector,”  and while those firms hiring have some pretty specific requirements, “being nice is a major attribute that many firms look for today in their marketers.” Again, Jago’s opinion serves as further evidence of an industry moving back to basics, as it moves forward.
 
At JFAM:Live! Financial Marketers’ Conference, leading financial marketers and agency leaders met to discuss media, creative, content, measurement, digital marketing and other drivers of financial marketing industry. The all-day conference included nine panel discussions and one presentation all revolving around financial marketing topics seeking to answer this “what’s next” question.
 
The agenda included the following highlights:
 
Today’s Standard: Excellence in Financial Media Strategy. This panel featured the media team (marketer and agency) that won “Best of Show” at The 2010 JFAM Media Strategy Awards earlier this year. The panel spoke at lengnth about the power of analytics in the media planning process and pointed out that , “while numbers and analytics are critical to success in financial media today, there is still a place for gut instinct and leadership in forging a compelling media strategy.”  Panelists included Jason Madrak, Head of Marketing, Consumer Markets, Aetna and from G2 Direct & Digital  Laurie Larson, VP, Associate Media Director, Kelley Train, Associate Media Director, Interactive, Taylor Nicholls, VP, Account Director, and Ken Beatty, Chief Analytics Officer.
 
Reputation in Financial: Now More Than Ever.  This panel peeled back the layers of reputation in financial services marketing and discussed its relative importance in financial marketing and how financial marketers today can (and cannot) guide a financial firms reputation for success. Panelists included Laura Kane, VP, External Relations, AFLAC Marty Dauer, CMO, Duff & Phelps, Jennifer O’Connell, PARTNERS + simons, Richard Aneser, Financial Advisory Consultant.  One key take-away from the conversation is that a financial brand is not necesarily the same thing as a financial firm’s reputation. Financial marketers must come back to basics to rebuild reputations—and brands.  A focus on the customer and her needs is essential in today’s environment.
 
Professional Investor Perceptions of Asset Management Firms. Unlike other formats at this JFAM:Live! Financial Marketers’ Conference, this was a presentation—not a conversation. Here, Daniel Rothman, Director of Research from the Financial Times unveiled preliminary results of a survey among US professional (not consumer) investors. The study revealed their perceptions of Asset Management Firms. Rothman predicated his presentation by noting that these results were preliminary and final results may vary. One key point that Rothman noted in the study was reflected by a question he asked of professional investors  to “Rate the importance of the following when considering an Asset Management firm to place your assets with?” At the top of the list, 92% of respondents cited that “Trustworthy” was a trait of “high importance” to professional investors. Interestingly “Brand Reputation” was only cited to be of “high importance” by 22% of respondents. This disparity could suggest that professional investors are looking beyond marketing to the integral fiber of a firm to the most fundamental of all financial traits, trustworthiness. For more information on this FT study, contact JFAM.
 
Digital Trends in Financial: New Rules of Engagement. This panel investigated new trends in digital marketing in financial services. Panelists included Bob Verrico, co-Founder, Investing Channel, Wendy Helfgott, Director of Marketing, FXCM and Andrew Wagner, CEO, TrafficBuyer.  The first question asked of the panel received unanimous agreement.  Has digital marketing in financial had its big growth spurt?  Or is the best yet to come?  The panel reacted in harmony that financial marketers “ain’t seen nothin’ yet” when it comes to digital marketing.  The power of the relationship echoed thoughout this discussion which, again, reflects a "back to basics" approach to forward movement in financial services marketing.
 
Moving Target: Reaching The New Financial Customer. This panel examined the changing nature of the financial consumer—particularly in recent times.  Is our new “educated financial consumer” easier for financial marketers to market to—or more complex?  Panelist opinions were mixed on this opening question, revealing that financial marketers can go directly to the consumer with offerings and opportunities.  At the same time, it was voiced that some financial consumers “know enough to be dangerous” and this fact opens new obstacles to financial marketers.  Panelists included Ken Murray, CMO, JG Wentworth, Frank Dudley, CEO, Brand New Idea and Michael Perlman, Managing Director, Compete, Inc (division of TNS).  One question from the audience provoked a conversation regarding “marketer empathy” for the consumer and how this should or should not shine through in marketing.
 
Current Economic Indicators & Why They Matter to Financial Marketers.  David Resler, Chief Economist, Nomura Holding and frequent TV commentator offered his take on what economic indicators today suggest to the US economy, US consumers and, by extension, financial services marketers.   His outlook suggested that the worst of the great recession has passed, yet at the same time it is not yet time to pop-open the champagne.  The economy we knew in the mid-2000’s was not “normal” so when we think of a return to normal in our economy and in our back pockets, we should be mindful to temper our expectations. “Housing starts, explained Resler, are going to increase from here on in--and this is  going to be our source of growth.  The economy is going to grow 2 ½ percent over the rest of the year, but no one is going to feel like they won the lottery.” The reason, explained Resler is that the  “level we went to is so low and was nowhere near normal.  The best we are going to see in the next 2 years will be what would have been the worst we ever saw before the last 2 years.  Resler also predicts that we are "not going to see rapid growth and employment because of the housing sector.”
 
Creative: Why It (Really) Matters Today.  This panel included John Derbick, AVP, Global Brand & Marketing,MetLife, Mark DiMassimo, CEO & Creative Director, DiMassimo Goldstein (DIGO), Delia Delisser, SVP, Advertising, TIAA-CREF and Sharon Solomon, Managing Director, RBC Capital Markets.  The group conceded on the importance of creative to connect—especially in today’s environment of distrust in financial firms.  One panelist pointed out that “the problem with financial institutions is that they are run by people who run financial institutions.”  In other words, financial firms lack the creative luxury of following gut instinct because of the conservative nature of most institutions and the layers of management that must approve marketing initiatives.  The result is a “sea of sameness” in financial marketing messaging.  The group conceded that there is, indeed, opportunity to be bold today in financial marketing.  Will marketers answer the call?  Time will tell.
 
Right Team: Hiring & Retention in Financial Marketing.  This session was two-pronged in format.  It was a brief presentation followed by question and answer.  The presenter was Tom Jago, Managing Director, The Ward Group and he offered advice both to those seeking to build out their own teams in financial marketing as well as to “all us who should be always mindful of actively managing their careers.”  The good news: something has changed in the last six weeks.  Hiring demand in financial marketing has skyrocketed.  However, his optimistic observation was tempered by the fact that financial marketers have very narrow and specific demands in terms of who they are looking for.  The challenge is meeting the list of “must haves” that a marketer demands in his candidate, explained Jago.
 
Changing Face: Content in Financial Marketing. “There’s a lot that has changed over the past years, explained one panelist. “ You see a lot of changes in the way people consume content.” This panel peeled back the layers and discussed what changes are now taking place in financial content and what these changes may suggest for the future of financial marketing.  The panel included Christina Bourke, Director & Head of Marketing, Americas at Credit Suisse, John von Brachel, Director Content and Publications, Merrill Lynch, Philip Parrotta, Head of Marketing, Americas, DWS Investments and Erin Hunt, Director at Vibrant Media. JFAM has noted that relevant content has always provided a necessary “wedge” into the mindsets of target audiences.  In financial, accurate intelligence can make or break personal fortunes or the shape the future of an institution—and for this reason financial marketers have relied on content to tow the line.  In part due to technological advances, financial content is changing.  “We understand that people want information, they want to be more informed so we want to be able to give that content to the in a profound.” This all harkens back to one of the key underlying themes at this JFAM:Live! It’s back to fundamentals in financial marketing today: keeping customers first in effective financial marketing today.
 
Measurement and Optimization in Financial Marketing. “It’s very difficult,” explained one panelist, “to associate (marketing) value with your final decision.” The experts that JFAM tapped for this panel were Craig Shiffrin, Sr. Marketing Manager, E*TRADE,  Julia Lennox, VP, Retirement Products at Metlife and Lea Synefakis-Pica, Manager, Digital Marketing Analytics for Prudential. Much conversation in this panel revolved around accountability for results and, more specifically, how actions can be associated with consequences. Marketers are more risk averse in difficult times and in terms of measurement and optimization, the focus on the fundamental of accountability for success has never been more pronounced.  As one panelist explained,  (in advertising),” where we view our biggest challenge is not (figuring out how)we can optimize online within itself but how does TV and print play a role and how all the mediums fit together and are influencing each other.”
 
 
Old Axioms, New Strategies: Business Marketing in Financial. “There’s complete change in your competitive set.  At the same time, there’s a lot of the same, your still solving problems for clients,” explained one panelist.  This panel, JFAM Chief Analyst, Bill Wreaks pointed out in his introduction begins with a prejudicial statement in its title—that business marketers  in financial services have based its strategies on old axioms. The panel, conceptually conceded this point that today business-to-business financial marketing  is reliant upon proven fundamentals of customer services and client responsiveness. “We’re going to be living in a new world for quite some time in the future,” explained one panelist.  “ Hopefully people have learned from what has happened to us all to really gain economic literacy.” Panelists included, Bruce D.Goldberg, CMO, International Securities Exchange, Jeffrey Wilson, SVP, Marketing, GE Capital, Kevin Windorf, SVP, Marketing, BMO Capital Markets and industry consultant, Ralph Piscitelli. What it comes down to in b-to-b financial marketing is that trust remains the bedrock of financial marketing. A key take-away: “If you don’t have trust in a financial institution, you’re in trouble.”
 
JFAM:Live! Financial Marketers’ Conference is, by design, dominated by conversation and dialog in a (primarily) panel discussion format.   Still, there were non-panel discussion portions of the program, as well. David Resler, Chief Economist at Nomura Holding, Japan’s largest financial institution, shared his research-driven opinions on “Leading Economic Indicators and What They Suggest to Financial Marketers. In addition, one in-depth study was presented by Daniel Rothman, Director of Research, The Financial Times on “Professional Investor Impressions of Top Asset Managers.” Rothman’s presentation echoed many of the “back to fundamentals” themes that resonated throughout the moderated panel conversations on stage. And, importantly, backed up these themes with empirical substance. In short, trust, relationships, reputation and accountability matter more than ever to the professional investor community.
 
JFAM:Live! Financial Marketers’ Conference was organized by The Gramercy Institute, publishers of The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing (JFAM).  The next JFAM:Live! Financial Marketers' Conference is scheduled for September 15, 2010 in New York City.
 
The event was sponsored by Financial Times, TIAA-CREF and The Wall Street Journal (Platinum), Digo, Gardner Nelson & Partners, Media Contacts, Compete, Inc., PARTNERS + simons, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Vibrant Media  (Gold) and  InvestingChannel (Silver).
 
For more information on JFAM:Live! Financial Marketers’ Conference and other JFAM events for senior financial marketers, contact: 212)752-0151, swreaks@financialadvertising.com or www.financialmarketer.com.
 
 
 
 

 

AETNA (WITH AGENCY G2 DIRECT & DIGITAL) TAKES “BEST OF SHOW” AT 5TH ANNUAL JFAM MEDIA STRATEGY AWARDS
 
·         Award Honors Excellence in Media Strategy within the Financial Services Category
·         “When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Smart.”
·         Financial Times—Founding & Presenting Sponsor, Winners Circle Sponsor—Vibrant Media

 

On Thursday evening, Aetna—along with its media agency G2 Direct & Digital—walked home with “Best of Show” honors from The 2010 JFAM Media Strategy Awards in New York City.  Of the winning media brief, judge Bryan Stapp of Loud Amplifier Marketing commented that, “excellent use of data, business intelligence and analytics (were engaged) to reduce the cost per lead and to exceed lead generation and sales goals.  I really like how they went into this with strong data and metrics to start off the campaign.  Well Done!”

The awards are produced annually by The Gramercy Institute, publishers of  The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing (JFAM).  The Financial Times is the founding and presenting sponsor of the event.  Vibrant Media is a Winners' Circle Sponsor.

Dozens of media briefs from the world’s leading financial services firms were reviewed and graded by 30 leading experts in financial services marketing.  Their results were averaged together and JFAM Media Strategy Awards were presented across nine categories.  In addition a “JFAM Best Global Media Strategy” award, a “JFAM Media Synergy Award” and a “JFAM Best of Show Award were all presented.
 
“When the going gets tough, the tough get smart,” said Bill Wreaks, Chief Analyst of The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing (JFAM), in his opening remarks to a crowd of over 100 senior financial marketers and agency strategists gathered to honor excellence in financial media strategy.  “We’ve been hosting this award for the past five years and there is no doubt that this is the brightest and most innovative collection of financial media briefs that we have ever asked our judges to review.” 
 
 
2010: JFAM Media Strategy Awards: CATEGORY WINNERS
·         Banking & Lending: ING Direct/Agency: TrafficBuyer, GWP Brand Engineering
·         Brokerage: Merrill Lynch/Agency: Starcom Worldwide
·         Corporate:  TIAA-CREF/Agency: TargetCast tcm
·         Credit Card & Payment Systems: MasterCard Priceless Gift Finder/Agency: GSD&M Idea City
·         General Financial—Consumer: USAA/Agency: Campbell Ewald
·         General Financial—Business: CFA/Agency: Doremus
·         Investment Banking: BMO Capital Markets
·         Individual Investor: Morgan Stanley-Smith Barney/Agency: Spark Communications
·         Institutional Investor: FXall/Agency: Silver Communications
·         Insurance: Aetna/G2 Direct & Digital
 
2010: JFAM Media Strategy Awards: SPECIAL AWARD WINNERS
·         JFAM Best Global Media Strategy: Merrill Lynch
·         JFAM Media Synergy Award: E*TRADE/Spark Communications
·         JFAM Best of Show AWARD: Aetna/G2 Direct & Digital
 
 
Judges: 2010 JFAM Media Strategy Awards
Judges of the JFAM Media Strategy Awards were: Gordon Abel/BlackRock, Carl Anderson/Doremus, Jay Bartlett/Xerox Corporation, Christina Bourke/Credit Suisse, Stuart Burkhoff/Ameriprise Financial, Julian Chu/Enova Financial, Joe Corriero/Merrill Lynch, David Deacon/Bank of America, John Derbick/Metlife, Michelle DelRosario/Pinebridge Investments, Larisa Drake/Discover Financial, Frank Dudley/Brand New Idea, Dawn Fichot/HSBC, Munir Haddad/Direct Partners, Elaine Hall/Gardner Nelson + partners, Jon Humphreys/Merrill Lynch, David May/Goldman Sachs, Catherine Merchant Jones/Prudential Financial, Gretchen Parks/Citi, Philip Parrotta/DWS Investments, Michael Perlman/Compete, Inc., Fred Pfaff/Fred Pfaff, Inc., Christopher Philip/Doremus, Ralph Piscitelli, Jackie Rhoades/Siegel + Gale, Stephanie Rogers/PARTNERS+simons, Noreen Ross/Dreyfus Investments, Danuta Shasha/Fidelity Investments, Eamonn Store/Mediaedge:cia, Barbara Sullivan/Sullivan + Co., Bryan Stapp/Loud Amplifier Marketing, John Tracey/Deutsche Bank, Jeff Wilson/GE Capital, Kevin Windorf/BMO Capital Markets and Carolyn Vipond/TIAA-CREF.
 
 
About The JFAM Media Awards & The  Gramercy Institute
The JFAM Media Strategy Award is organized by The Gramercy Institute.  The company specializes in issues surrounding financial services marketing. TGI clients include Barron’s, Bloomberg Media, CNBC, Compete, Inc., Competitrack, Conde Nast, Crain’s, Doremus, Dow Jones, The Deal, Financial Times, Getty Images, Google, The International Herald Tribune, Investor’s Business Daily, InvestingChannel,  Journal of Accountancy, Leadfusion, Microsoft Advertising, New York Times, The New Yorker, Nikkei America, Pearson Publishing, Pensions & Investments, TargetCast tcm, TIAA-CREF, Vibrant Media, Yahoo! The Wall Street Journal, Zillow.com Yellow Pages Association, and others.
 
The Gramercy Institute publishes The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing, a professional journal devoted to sharing expert opinions in and about the financial marketing industry. The company also manages The Financial Marketers’ Alliance, a network comprising over 1100 financial marketing professionals, worldwide and through its Gramercy Institute hosts numerous events each year around financial marketing-related topics.
 
Based in New York, the company (www.financialmarketer.com), is separated into three distinct areas: Publishing, Network & Events, and Research & Consulting.
 
Contact:
Samantha Wreaks
212-752-0151
swreaks@financialadvertising.com
 
# # # #
 

 

Communication has forever been at the heart of marketing. Sellers must communicate with buyers. More recently, technology has enabled marketers the luxury of two-way communication so that buyers, too, can feasibly communicate with sellers. At the center of effective marketing communications is a common language. The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing is pleased to submit this piece, “The Language of Marketing: Between a Rock and a Hard Rule” as the first part of a continuing series about using the English language in the financial community. JFAM’s editorial director, Kip Fry, lends his own perspective on this subject below.

Bill Wreaks, Chief Analyst,The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing

 
THE LANGUAGE OF MARKETING:
Between a Rock and a Hard Rule
By Kip Fry

I once spoke to an older woman who couldn’t stand reading the local newspaper because reporters there always started sentences with the word “and.” Yes, it’s true it sometimes happens. But no, I couldn’t believe it was all that sinful. I just could not persuade her of that. She remained quite emphatic that the grammatical error was terrible and that it was a horrible paper.

 

Scholars note that there is no precise rule forbidding starting sentences that way. (The same is true with the word “but.” ) In fact, the principle concerning “and” has been largely ignored since the times of the Anglo-Saxons. Even William Shakespeare used it to begin some of his sentences.

When it comes to rules that guide the English language, it is sometimes hard to know what is a rule and what is not. Not everyone knows that there is actually no such convention against splitting infinitives. But “Fowler’s Modern English Usage,” one of the most trusted sources for writers, discusses “the irrational nervousness that many people feel when they imagine that by splitting an infinitive, they are in danger of breaking a terrible taboo.”

Probably the easiest way to look at these principles is to realize that they are really just a guide. Be careful, though. Don’t take too many liberties with them. There is no way everyone around the world can follow the same English grammar and usage rules all of the time (especially if they speak French).

But these things do make a huge difference when it comes to editors. They are the ones who have to make sure that things are consistent throughout a publication. They cannot allow one style to be used at the beginning of a piece and another style at the end. It should be the same throughout. Otherwise it will look like editors don’t know what they are doing.

Linguist James C. Bostain once wrote: “Almost anyone who has survived the educational system in this or most other countries is certain to be confused about one language – his own.” English is confusing enough and it is hard to correct everything all the time. It is one in which an identical spelling of three different words can appear in the same sentence, have three different meanings and still be correct, “since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present,” and in which the word “quick” does not rhyme with “Buick,” even though four out of five of its letters are the same.

 

Go figure, but those are some of the crazy rules applied to the language. Call them hard rules. Without them, we would only talk gibberish and never say what it was we wanted to communicate. So rules must exist. They are what tell us that the “u” in “quick” cannot be pronounced the same way as the “u” in “Buick” because the first one follows a “q.” As a result, the “u” is given the sound of “w,” so “quick” remains a one-syllable word (“kwick”), as opposed to “byoo-ick.”

When it comes to the English language and all its vagaries, though, some rules have to be given latitude. When they govern these situations, they tend to be much softer, and accordingly could be called soft rules, at least by me. Take, for example, the cases mentioned at the beginning.

Bostain continues: “Textbooks will tell you, for example, that double negative means positive, but this is a statement about logic, not about language. If a child says, ‘I didn’t eat nothing,” who but an idiot would ask, ‘Was it good?’”

The youngster’s sentence is probably common when spoken, but if it had been written down on paper, editors would likely gasp. When things are recorded with ink and paper (or toner), there is a real permanence to them, so things must be correct before they are saved to the hard disk. If the rules aren’t followed, especially with things such as punctuation, mass confusion can soon erupt. That is definitely not what you want when people read your writing.

Spelling is another example of a hard rule. Except for variations found in the dictionary, spelling rules should not be broken, although some people (proponents of phonetic spelling) have tried it in the past with little luck. As members of the business community, most JFAM readers should know the difference between “insure” and “ensure.” You should because insurance is such a large component of the financial industry. When it comes to spelling it, though, there seems to be some confusion. “Insure” is used only when referring to insurance, whether it be auto, health, life or any of its other forms. “Ensure” means to make certain or guarantee. An example is “the insurance agent should ensure that the customer is covered by the policy.”

Historically, these words go back centuries. “Ensure” dates to the time around 1385. “Insure” is not nearly so old, having been coined as recently as 1533, and is defined as an “engagement to marry.” Its use as a commercial word, in which it was a “security against loss or death in exchange for payment,” started in 1651.

This may all seem pretty mundane if you have a basic understanding of the precepts, but the fact is that many people, well-educated though they may be, still manage to do these and other silly things like put periods and commas outside quotation marks. My response? Don’t do that! Periods and commas always go inside the marks. What makes it confusing is that colons and semicolons are placed outside. 

But how strict should these rules be? Are they an absolute end-all, inscribed in a marble block that cannot be modified or challenged? Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it.” As an editor, I can say that not everyone who minds it is a fool, but Thoreau realized that there should be a measure of tolerance for those who sometimes stretch them a bit. Just remember that if it is done once in a text, it should be done every single time.

Hard rules are not difficult to learn. They just become hard when they are not followed.

 

 
Kip Fry is the editorial director of The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing and a freelance writer. He can be contacted at kipfry@yahoo.com. This is the first part of a continuing series about using the English language in the financial community.

 

Experts have suggested that, in the future, human attention will become one of the most precious commodities on earth. Those who can tap into it hold the keys to marketing success. But attention comes with a price on the part of those giving it. This is price is time. Further complicating the challenge, those consumers who have the least time to spare are the most coveted by marketers.

Think about it. If a financial marketer can affect a decision-maker’s opinion better than a competitor, and in less time, this marketer wins. Truly, time is money and Andrew Paluka, CEO of One Minute Media, understands both the cost and benefit of keeping marketing messages short and sweet. JFAM readers can learn a great deal from Andrew’s article — and it’ll only take you a minute.

 

Bill Wreaks
Chief Analyst,The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing
 
 
THE MAGIC OF A MINUTE
By Andrew S. Pakula

Got a minute?

That’s all anyone seems to have these days.

 

Time-pressed consumers browsing for fast, specific information represent the single biggest advertising opportunity for financial services marketers. To seize it, you’ll need a controlled process that connects in a minute and charges by the minute, as well. Empowered by computers and mobile phones, our self-selection generation is consuming information however, wherever, and whenever they want it. Instead of sitting through half-hour TV news programs or paging through the daily newspaper, they’re clicking through websites second by second to glimpse just the facts they need at that moment.

 

Though challenging to reach, this information-hungry audience represents the single biggest opportunity for financial marketers. People are seeking authoritative answers on specific problems crucial to their financial well-being. Supplying those answers is a big step toward rebuilding the trust that the economic spiral has eroded.

 

To take this step, financial services marketers need to meet people on their terms and educate them rather than openly promote their products. Self-selectors establish specific openings when they seek information. Targeting the openings involves not only place and time, but tone as well. There are still arenas where people embrace long-form, blatant promotion, but the Internet is not one of them.

 

There are three parts to this story:
1) A growing appetite exists for financial services information online, provided it’s fast, credible, accurate and free;

2) The conventional model for providing information in a TV format cannot be sustained in the online world, where quality has to be delivered at a fraction of the traditional cost; and

3) There is a new model for online video that brands the delivery of specific information in a controlled, monitored environment at a low cost.

 

When money talks, everyone listens

Arguably, there’s more need now than ever before for financial information that’s believable, comprehensible and usable. That’s the benefit of a marketplace running scared. Whether it’s in the gym, on the train or at a cocktail party, the conversation inevitably shifts to the economy and managing your money. There are libraries available on just about every financial question. The problem is how quickly and easily it can be accessed. People need immediate answers, one question at a time, so they can act quickly or at least satisfy their curiosity or concern right away.

 

Here are the top 10 serious financial conditions people are suffering from:
1) Late payments and/or defaults;
2) Devalued equity of real estate;
3) Business consolidation and closings;
4) Unemployment;
5) Depletion of savings;
6) Financial industry corruption;
7) Higher property taxes;
8) Weak or no credit;
9) High credit card interest rates; and

10) Overall loss of confidence in the markets and their future.

 

With all that, and the dozens of other forms this pressure is taking, there’s nothing more important than empathy when approaching consumers. Let all the people in the “help me, don’t sell me” mode discover how helpful your company is.

“Nobody wants to talk to a salesman, but everyone wants to talk to an expert,” says Howard Seibel, managing director of Wharton Strategic Services and former marketing chief for online banking pioneer National Discount Brokers. “Financial services companies have a great opportunity to rebuild trust and build new brands by teaching consumers how to manage financial affairs and make informed purchase decisions.”

 

Good thing, because financial institutions — in particular, brick-and-mortar banks — need to expand their business with the two biggest, yet least financially savvy, pockets of the population, consumers and small businesses. With bad loans depleting cash reserves, and drops in stock and asset values, banks can’t borrow as much as they need. The only solution is to rebuild the coffers, and that requires a flowing pipeline from consumers and small businesses.

For consumers, the emphasis is on saving and smart spending — starting, growing, expanding and fully understanding the practice and the growing number of options. The more customers save, the more capital the bank has to borrow against. For small businesses, the emphasis is on the ABCs, such as how to incorporate a company, structure a partnership, get a loan, and market the business, along with many other fundamentals. Again, the more they make, the more the bank has to float and borrow against.

 

These 10 conditions create natural topics for brief, educational videos that can be accessed on a prospect’s own time. By providing the valuable information, a brand establishes a relationship. It has “provided a needed, trusted service” for the consumer.

Fast facts

In a world where eight-letter text messages are the new shorthand, print and even phone calls have become laborious ways to access information. Business executives in particular, have developed a kind of ADD as a survival mechanism. They get a thought, click the search bar, scan the resulting news sites and blogs for data, and forward it instantly via a widening array of digital devices. And it’s not just business. From pre-teens to grandparents, people are getting hooked on instant information.

 

As this e-audience grows less patient and more elusive, marketers will need to tie brands to believable information with a cost structure that works online.

Consider the paradox of announcements around the new year relating to online video. On one hand, TV Week dubbed 2009 “the year of branded Web video.” On the other, analyst Imran Khan from JPMorgan published a report declaring that the traditional online video advertising model will fail because it doesn’t fit the Internet framework.

 

The reasons Khan cited are instructive. First, online video companies have “failed to understand” advertisers’ concerns over the uncontrolled nature of such popular platforms as YouTube. These offer no official screening for editorial credibility and the content can be downloaded, shared and distributed wantonly. Second, the online video marketplace has yet to institutionalize audience guarantees that marketers have come to expect from television.

Change is coming, but from outside the television mainstream. The regular model, which seeks to superimpose a television production process onto the Internet, is too cumbersome and expensive. Conventional TV advertising relies on a broad passive audience, in which millions of households leave the set on, whether anyone is even watching, let alone the intended audience. This will justify multi-million-dollar ad revenues. Advertisers take a gamble, paying against audience estimates where the only guarantee is sets that have been left on.

By contrast, Internet advertising is built on interactive, accountable, one-to-one relationships. The connections are precise in search marketing. People search for information about specific topics. Whereas standard TV cannot guarantee that viewers will be interested in the problems a brand solves, the Internet is set up for personally relevant communication on a mass scale.

 

My company has experience launching a new online video model called Know it in a Minute, which proves that the medium can be productive, profitable and fully accountable for marketers. To accomplish this, we had to work backward from the experience viewers expect and the cost marketers can afford.

For example, research showed us that one minute is the average time a consumer will devote to watching an online video. And, importantly, their viewing is more purposeful than playful. They watch in order to learn something specific right now.

 

Audience members can be tracked when they are online. It turns out to be nearly a one-to-one proposition. Anyone viewing a one-minute informational video is a prospective customer for the sponsoring brand. Since branded videos went live on www.knowitinaminute.com in October, they have averaged more than 10,000 to 15,000 unique viewers per month, which is the industry norm. Contrary to conventional TV, we know those viewers are brand prospects. We can track every viewer and their clicks to the sponsored brand’s website.

For online video to pay off fully, we found we had to deliver a guaranteed, self-selecting audience on a competitive, cost-per-view basis. Search advertising has been the most reliable and fastest growing form of marketing communication. It’s a proposition designed around a cost-per-click notion. Financial marketers now pay $5 to $25 every time a consumer clicks on a paid link. At this writing, the “credit card” keywords can be bought for $13 per click, while “financial service” fetches $4 per click. The bidding process keeps costs in line with return.

 

If we could deliver the engagement of an information video that’s completely relative to the sponsor’s brand, providing answers to key questions now, and charging a price consistent with industry standards for search, we would effectively advance state-of-the-art online marketing.

To do that, though, we had to bring production expenses way down and create TV quality at Internet cost. The average production for a 30-second TV commercial in 2008 was valued at $380,000, according to the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Factor in millions of views, and the price becomes palatable. On the Internet, though, the realistic goal is thousands of highly targeted and focused one-to-one viewers. They are the right people, the ones most likely to become customers. To work, the professional video has to be produced for less than $5,000.

 

Videos need to relate directly to brands and maintain editorial excellence at the same time, so clients have to be involved in the process from concept to creation. To maintain control, they are only aired on www.knowitinaminute.com. No user-generated website postings, downloadable files or “e-mail this” functions exist. That way, views can be scheduled, tracked and reported completely in real time — something traditional media cannot do. Importantly, the one-site process allows any necessary editorial changes to be made instantly.

It’s instructive that we had to invent the model. There is no way to adapt ordinary models to deliver what’s ultimately needed to connect with targeted groups of consumers self-selecting from millions of websites. Everything about the model is new, including production costs of 1 percent of commercial costs, trans-coding content for myriad formats and continual tracking of viewing by time of day. But it won’t be for long. New ideas that work become new standards quickly in the Internet space.

 

In the meantime, marketing doesn’t have to be mission impossible in 2009.

Got a minute?

 

 

Andrew S. Pakula is CEO of One Minute Media, LLC, a New York- and LA-based producer of branded “Know it in a minute” videos (www.knowitinaminute.com).

 

JAMIE DIMON:
Buying a House on Fire
By Kip Fry
 
 
Jamie Dimon might be considered a man of surprises. Many people have been stunned and shocked by his behavior in the boardroom and his attitudes about the business world that go against the tide. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find a quote from Albert Einstein, one of the world’s greatest thinkers, in a letter Dimon recently wrote to the stockholders of JPMorgan Chase. 
 
The words? “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
 
Dimon, Chase’s dynamic CEO, may have chosen these words as a way of grounding all the numbers, percentages and statistics with the human experience. That way he assured readers that the letter will touch their collective minds and souls, making it much more personal and easier to relate to. Einstein wasn’t the only great thinker cited in the letter. Dimon also pulled thoughts and ideas from Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

 

Dimon’s words and attitudes have long sparked a wide array of viewpoints, especially in the financial world. People whose perspectives are skewed primarily by personal feelings look at him negatively. To them, he is not always likeable and their own strong language shows that. The positive views are from others who are more likely to look at him strictly for his business practices. Love him or hate him, after all these years in the industry, he still grabs the headlines.

 

The letter he wrote to shareholders early in 2009 is considered by some to be one of the greatest ever written. It is nothing but honest in its assessment of the company’s health in these times of financial distress and Dimon’s role in its current status. He opens by saying that what happened on Wall Street during the preceding year was “largely unprecedented and virtually inconceivable.”

 

He continues, though, by writing: “Although our financial results were weak in absolute terms . . . reflecting terrible market conditions, I believe . . . that this year may have been one of our finest.” It sounds much like Winston Churchill’s “This was their finest hour” speech during the depths of World War II. They both demanded similar language and sentiments.

 

“The way forward will not be easy,” Dimon wrote. “We do not know what the future will bring, but we do know that it will require everyone – the banks, the regulators and the government – to work together and get it right. As we prepare for a very tough 2009, with most signs pointing to continued deterioration of the economy, we still remain long-term optimists about our future and that of our country. Whatever may come, we will meet the challenge.”

 

Dimon states some straight economic data. JPMorgan Chase earned nearly $6 billion in 2008. While that may be impressive for most companies, the figure is down 64 percent from the year before, when the company made $15 billion. “So clearly, this was not a great year financially,” he wrote, adding that the results were troubled by two factors: increasing credit costs and investment bank write-downs of more than $10 billion. The second one was essentially caused by leveraged lending and exposed mortgages.

 

Dimon had to share some unhappy news, such as a net loss of $700 million in private equity, a drop from a $4 billion gain in 2007. “We love the private equity business, but as we indicated in prior years, private equity returns are by their nature lumpy, and we did not expect the stellar 2007 results to be repeated in 2008. We will remain patient and still expect this business to deliver in excess of 20 percent return on equity for us over time.”

 

As for the well-documented purchase of Bear Stearns in 2008, he admits that the final price ($1.5 billion) was far less than it would have been had the circumstances been normal. “We were not buying a house – we were buying a house on fire,” he writes. Despite these concerns, Dimon expects the purchase to eventually add $1 billion to the company’s ledgers.

A similar situation arose a few months later when the FDIC seized the assets of Washington Mutual and Chase was able to acquire that company as well. Dimon expects profits of $2 billion in 2009 from that sale alone.

 

So how did Chase evade the ferocity of the economic crisis? Dimon writes that Chase reduced its subprime expenditures, and that it never pursued the idea of adding to its structured finance business. It also did not leverage its capital and maintained a high level of liquidity. Dimon supports the government’s bailout of Wall Street corporations and Chase’s receipt of its TARP money. Although Chase was financially sound at the time, Dimon decided that it was best to take the money because the company did not want other institutions to think that they were being tainted by accepting it. It did not want to “be parochial or selfish and stand in the way of actions (by) the government” had they not taken the money.

 

“We think the government acted boldly in a very tough situation, the outcome of which could have possibly been far worse had it not taken such steps,” he writes.

 

All in all, it is a sterling example of what can be done with what would normally be a boring and mundane document. Dimon even turns to an elegant quote from Teddy Roosevelt: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and . . . if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
 
*     *     *

 

Dimon, of course, is considered the mastermind of the JPMorgan Chase takeover of Bear Stearns earlier this year. As chief executive officer of the corporation, he was in charge during the period when the financial crisis almost knocked down the wall on Wall Street.

 

He also serves as director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In that role, he influences monetary policy in the country by setting discount rates and electing its chairman.

 

Dimon’s stockholder letter of April 2009 paints the picture of a company that, despite the recent crisis, should be seen as being incredibly successful. Somewhere, within the midst of the turmoil that spelled doom for so many Wall Street companies, JPMorgan Chase managed to keep its head well above the murky waters. As a matter of fact, even if the company had not received its hefty $25 billion bailout from the federal government, it would have gained nearly 9 percent in its Tier 1 capital.

Much of this success can be rightfully attributed directly to Dimon. Although he is not known as a marketer per se, his skill in mergers and acquisitions has kept Chase at the top of the heap. In fact, it could be stated that the move was, in its own way, a marketing maneuver.

 

Whatever the reason, Dimon has earned many accolades over the years. He has been called “a straightforward, unpretentious workaholic” and “enormously ambitious” (Leah Nathans Spiro, BusinessWeek), “one of the very brightest guys in finance in that (graduating) class” (Jay O. Light, Harvard University) as well as a man with a “ferocious ego” with a penchant for “sweating the details” and an “impetuous hothead” (Mara Der Hovanesian, BusinessWeek). His “brash, iconoclastic manner has made Dimon the most watched, most discussed, most loved, and most feared banker in the world today,” writes Shawn Tully of Fortune.

 

He also has been placed on a lot of lists, such as Time’s 100 Most Influential People and Crain’s New Influentials, no small accomplishment.

 

Questions also abound about him. A headline in BusinessWeek recently asked its readers if he was good or just lucky.

 

There is also no shortage of quotes directly from his mouth. At the most recent Davos meeting in Switzerland, he stated, “We gave them (customers) weapons of mass destruction to borrow too much.”

Then, in February of this year, he stated that “JPMorgan would be fine if we stopped talking about the damn nationalization of banks. We’ve got plenty of capital. To policymakers, I say where were they? . . . They approved all these banks. Now they’re beating up everyone, saying look at all these mistakes, and we’re going to come and fix it.”

 

Dimon is not known for his tact in the boardroom. As a young executive on his way up the corporate ladder, he once interrupted a meeting to erase a list of names from a whiteboard, including the name of a supervisor and then placed them under his own name, indicating that he was more fit for the job. The other supervisor soon resigned.

 

His renown is not for his management or marketing capacities. Instead, he has the uncanny ability to oversee mergers and acquisitions at JPMorgan Chase. Bear Stearns is a recent example. In 1985, he and his mentor Sandy Weill joined forces to take over Commercial Credit, which eventually became Citigroup. Eight years later came the merger of Shearson and Smith Barney (under Weill). He also benefited from the 2004 union between Chase and Bank One. Dimon had been CEO at the Chicago-based Bank One for several years and promptly moved to a similar position at Chase. He considers this M&A activity so second nature that he calls it elephant hunting.

 

But enough about what people have said about Jamie Dimon and what he has offered in his own words. What are his accomplishments, other than alienating and invigorating his employees all at the same time?

 

For one thing, while at Smith Barney, he prodded the company to become the first brokerage to sell no-load mutual funds. At the time, the move broke industry tradition. He also set the trend of using the computer program Quicken in the office. But as Spiro noted in a 1997 article, “Many bankers, wooed by hefty contracts and ambitious plans, left embittered and blame Dimon for broken promises, mismanagement, and treating them with disdain.”

 

That leads to stories of rude and maybe even mean behavior. Like the time he told someone in a meeting that an idea that was just announced was one of the stupidest things he had ever heard, prompting an underling at the meeting to complain anonymously that Dimon needed to lighten up.

 

So how did Dimon come to this point in his life? Several generations ago, there were no Dimons. Instead, the family name was Papademetriou, a sign of their Turkish ancestry. Born James L. Dimon in 1956, Jamie’s father, Theodore, sold stocks for a living, as did his grandfather. So he was raised with the notions of enterprise deep in his blood.While still a youngster, the Dimons moved from Queens to Manhattan and was enrolled in the elite Browning School on the East Side and afterward, Tufts University in Massachusetts.

 

What followed then is now an oft-told story. While looking for work several years later, he stopped in to see Weill, an old family friend who then worked at American Express. It was an encounter that would change his life. Weill would mentor him for a number of years, allowing them to work on the formation of Citigroup. But the relationship would eventually suffer a falling out, another turning point in Dimon’s life.

 

The two had set up shop at the Citigroup office with Dimon acting as Weill’s associate. But Dimon soon discovered that Weill’s daughter, Jessica Bibiowicz, was under his management umbrella, and when he opted not to give her a promotion, Weill got upset and fired him.

 

“Everyone has their ups and downs,” Dimon recently told The Economic Times. “Tell me one person you admire, not just in business, but in life, and you’ll find they had their share. Nelson Mandela walked out of prison after 27 years, magnanimous to his captors. You have to get up, brush yourself and move on.”

 

He tells the story of how his firing affected his family, especially his three young daughters. The youngest one wanted to know if they would have to sleep on the streets, while the second was concerned about going to college. But the oldest girl, 12 at the time, asked if she could use his cell phone, now that he wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

From there, he took over at Bank One in Chicago. He then put his merger skills to the test and acquired JPMorgan, where he eventually became CEO. Once there, he decided that the company would not offer subprime loans. It was a rare move at the time among industry leaders. When the crisis hit, his company was the only one with enough spending power to purchase both Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. The government asked Dimon to intervene and he readily agreed.

 

Several biographies have been written about Jamie Dimon (by Duff McDonald and Patricia Crisafulli, for instance) and are filled with many more stories. Today, Jamie Dimon’s star has not lost any of its luster. When Barack Obama was elected president, Dimon’s name even surfaced for the Secretary of the Treasury position (eventually offered to Timothy Geithner). Despite that, Dimon has remained an outspoken supporter of the president, especially his economic bailout. In fact, Dimon remains on Obama’s call list whenever the president wants to talk economics.

Obama once proclaimed that “there are a lot of banks that are actually pretty well managed, JPMorgan being a good example. Jamie Dimon, the CEO there, I don’t think he should be punished for doing a pretty good job managing an enormous portfolio.”

 

That does not mean he has all the answers. At Davos last spring, he stated, “I haven’t yet seen people get all the right people in a room, close the damn door and come out with a solution.”

 

So where does JPMorgan Chase stand in the future of banking? Quite likely, it will stand tall. During the first quarter of 2009, for instance, Chase lent $150 billion to some 4.5 million customers, certainly a good sign amid a crisis. With all the mergers and acquisitions that Jamie Dimon has participated in over the years, the company may have a totally different look before too long. But wherever Dimon will be at that time, it will be a place near the top.
 

Kip Fry is Editorial Director of The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing and a freelance writer. He can be contacted at kipfry@yahoo.com.

Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve Web site opens with the question: “If you knew everything about tomorrow, what would you do differently today?” With this in mind, JFAM asked Popcorn 10 questions to peer into BrainReserve’s crystal ball for predictions about trends in the year ahead.

Bill Wreaks ,Chief Analyst ,The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing
 
Faith Popcorn Looks into the Future:
10 Questions with the Financial Seer
 
Recognized as America’s leading trend expert, Popcorn has been hailed as “the trend oracle” by The New York Times and the “Nostradamus of marketing” by Fortune. As CEO and founder of the marketing consultancy BrainReserve, she is a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies and businesses around the world. Popcorn is the author of “The Popcorn Report,” “Clicking,” “EVEolution: Understanding Women — Eight Essential Truths that Work in Your Business and Your Life,” and most recently “Dictionary of the Future.”
According to its recent release, Popcorn has predicted that the year ahead will be a year marked by unprecedented fear, anxiety and uncertainty. We will likely see a range of consumer reactions to a nation that has seen itself moving in the wrong direction. “This is not a momentary correction, nor a down cycle,” Popcorn states. “It’s the end of the world as we know it. What we’ll be deciding is whether we’ll simply succumb, or whether through a set of new rules of engagement, we’ll find a new way to set our priorities.”
Through her marketing consultancy, Popcorn works with clients who apply her insights on cultural and business trends in order to reposition companies or brands, define areas of new business opportunities and develop new products. She is available to discuss the new rules of engagement, including additional predictions that are tangible manifestations of these new rules.
 
1) What macro trends do you see for the year ahead and what are the implications for marketers?
Most of these are painfully obvious — restraint, epidemic mistrust and sweeping personal recalibration. From a psychological perspective, I think we’ll see a reaction to the out-of-controlness of the world at large. That reaction will be a species of hyper-control in areas where we have some influence, for example, making sure that our blackberry address books are just perfect and up-to-date, obsessively making lists and trying to control our kids because they are in control of nothing else. We’ll try desperately to organize our lives.
 
2) What are the new rules of engagement?
The four new rules of engagement are: reclaim, retrench, reset and reinvent.
“Reclaiming” is about reframing our power relationships with companies. Driven by what is known as “Icon Toppling,” a new socioquake is transforming mainstream America and the world as the pillars of society are questioned and rejected. Look for the death of the consumer. Long live the citizen. With the mutuality of responsibility, citizenship suggests shared values and interests, democratic decision-making, full disclosure and a free-ranging, ongoing dialogue.
“Retrenching” is hunkering down and praying for survival. It’s driven by “cocooning,” a retreat to the home to protect oneself from the harsh, unpredictable realities of the outside world. We’ll see that cuddles trump coupons. A premium will be based on brands that demonstrate empathy. In other words, it’s an understanding of the consumer plight. There will be a combination of messaging, price and purchase continuity programs that offer progressive refunds, as just a few examples. The strategy is simple: Be with them when they’re down and they’ll remember you when they’re up.
“Reset” is a voluntary cutback to find a new equilibrium. This is driven by “cashing out,” in which working men and women question their personal and career satisfaction and goals. People are opting for a simpler way of living. And it means we’re Scrooged. If you’re looking for immediate proof, watch the Christmas sales.
“Reinvent” is a rediscovery and reaffirmation of American ingenuity. It’s driven by “fantasy adventure,” in which the modern age whets our appetite for roads untaken. Watch for the development of a wampum economy. A shadow economy will emerge, driven by a culture of haggling, swapping, bartering, hacking and reusing. It all hearkens back to a time where direct citizen-to-citizen relationships drove the economy, rather than being disintermediated by channel and manufacturing.
 
3) In this new bailout world, what trends and opportunities exist in the financial sector and financial services marketing industry?
Opportunities are vast in this “game reset” period. But it will be very difficult to establish trust. The financial sector needs high margin products, but the flight to safety means consumers are obsessed with capital preservation. There’s a real conflict there. That’s not going to change next year or the year after. So the financial sector will need to develop services versus products to generate any kind of profitability.
 
4) What key trends in the technology sector should financial services marketers follow closely?
Cybercrime will be a huge issue in the future because companies are cutting back on the security budgets and hackers thrive in an unstable world. Financial services marketers should start thinking about making cyber-security a really key strategic advantage. What are you doing to protect my identity from hackers?
 
5) What advice would you give to chief marketing officers today?
Throw out the rule book.
 
6) How can financial services marketers take a more proactive brand leadership approach in light of these trends?
We’re (Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve) saying that financial services marketers were all trained in one era with one set of rules. And now they’re in another era and they absolutely do not know the new language and how to navigate it. They need to really go back to trend school and understand how you predict trends. They need to understand the world of culture . . . We say that culture is the new media.
You have to market your brand in the culture and most financial people have no idea about what’s in the culture. You’ll say to them, “Did you see the movie ‘Slumdog Millionaire?’” (They’ll say) “no.” “Have you gone to the East Village?” just talking New York now, and they’ll say “no.”
We (BrainReserve) have a TalentBank, a panel of over 10,000 visionaries worldwide with experts from every industry and cultural area from media and medics to marketers and academics. We have 40 TrendSpotters, an elite global force of cultural and social thinkers. We do 6,000 one-on-one interviews. We have something set up called VOC, the “Voice of the Consumer,” where we can talk to them day and night on behalf of ourselves and our clients. You have to really be out there brailling, brailling, brailling the culture (analyzing a range of cultural developments). I think that is really the first big step that financial services people have to make. It’s not happening on the balance sheet. It’s happening in the culture.
 
7) What’s unique about BrainReserve’s methodology?
Along with our TalentBank, we have a three-and-a-half decade old TrendBank that has been 95 percent predictive. As I say, we have these trend watchers globally. We are constantly reading across the board. We read 540 documents in 20 languages monthly. We braille the music, the books, the plays, the everything of the culture and the future culture.
 
8) What trends give you the greatest hope for the year ahead?
I’d have to say “anchoring,” the spirituality trend, reaching back to our spiritual roots and taking what was secure from the past in order to prepare ourselves for the future. That and “cocooning.”
One good thing about the fallout is that people are staying at home more and they are bonding with their families and starting to cook again. They are finding religion again and finding values again. They are turning away from money, mainly because there is none. But it’s quite wonderful, in some ways, what’s coming out of it.
 
9) Regarding these two trends of “anchoring” and “cocooning,” are there any particular strategic insights for financial services marketers?
It’s all about relationships. How does their customer feel about “them” — not “them” with the big “T” but “them” with the little “t” — meaning the person. So where is the relationship? In financial services, you’re giving someone your money. Look at Bernie Madoff. He certainly knew how to do it, but not for the right reasons. It’s going to be really harder and harder to build trust. I know this is wild, but we’re just going to have to be authentic and tell the truth and that will establish trust over the long term.
 
10) What book should be at the top of every marketer’s reading list?

A fiction book called “The Stone Gods” by Jeanette Winterson. It’s a book about the future. It’s a clarion warning cry about what can happen if we don’t clean up our act — our act meaning to behave in a way that would make our forefathers proud of us. It’s a really terrifying book . . . All of this says that the rules of engagement are going to change.

Few will argue that we are in the throes of a crushing financial crisis in the U.S. The American economy, and likewise that of the world, struggles to come to terms with its real value.
Call it what you will: the credit crisis; the global recession; or the downturn, many see this as the result of a void of leadership in the U.S. The country has one president-elect and one lame duck president. One has momentum and no authority, the other has authority and no momentum. Inaction does not help.
“There is a leadership vacuum in the United States, and financial markets will not stabilize until the U.S. as a country comes to terms with the real situation,” one senior marketer at a major foreign-based investment bank recently noted.
This situation creates some good news and some bad. The good news is that in 1993, the U.S. home ownership rate was slightly more than 64 percent. Today, it is approximately 68 percent. The unfortunate side is that in this same period, the U.S. personal savings rate declined from 8 percent of income to about 2 percent. Consumers were left with no viable “Plan B” in the event the housing market tanked. But when it did, the institutions got involved by securitizing the loans. Consequently, a financial situation has evolved into an industry-wide crisis, spreading from the consumer level to the largest Wall Street institution with no end in sight.
No sector has been hit harder than financial. Its marketing sector must not only adapt, but in some cases, its role in the firm must be reinvented. The suddenness of the change is what has made the marketing challenge so pronounced. The S&P 500’s financial sector has gone from 16 percent growth in 2006 to -20 percent in 2007 and to a -51 percent in November 2008 (YTD). And in two months’ time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has retreated from 11,500 points to 7,500. For those financial marketers who communicate the value of these financial institutions, there are many challenges ahead of them.
Jon Mittnacht, director of global advertising at Citi Global Wealth Management, agrees. “We have an interesting challenge over the next 12 to 18 months because the market has been traumatized. I think of what’s happening as a ‘financial 9/11,’” he says.
Claiming responsibility is the essential first step to fixing any predicament. While there seems to be plenty of finger pointing, some key parties are ducking responsibility. This makes the healing process longer and more painful for all. My feeling is that the responsibility of the crisis belongs to several of the primary groups. It belongs to Washington politicians, it belongs to Wall Street executives, it belongs to the consumers who should have known better and it belongs to those other people along the way who oversold and underexplained significant consequences.
“I’m not trying to absolve the (financial) institutions of any blame,” says Mittnacht, “but I think if there was ever a crisis that was a combination of the greed of the institutions and the greed of the individuals who overextended themselves, that this is it. The politicians aren’t going to get elected by pointing fingers at the country and saying, ‘you shouldn’t be so greedy.’”
 
*     *     *     *     *
The Chinese word for “crisis” consists of two individual characters. The first translates, by itself, as “danger.” The second means “opportunity.” Of course, we see the danger in our current financial situation. Unfortunately, many financial firms and individuals have suffered at the hand of this danger. There is opportunity in our current economic environment. Because of it, financial marketing and marketers will enter a new, higher caliber of marketing in the not-so-distant future. It is characterized by terms such as transparency, efficiency, effectiveness and measurement. These are the institutions that will lead the economy back to firmer ground.
My view of our industry is Darwinian in perspective. In times of crisis, the strong will ultimately become stronger and these firms will lead us in the future. The weak will further weaken and eventually fade away, making room for new ideas and new leadership. Alas, this vision of our long term future does little to help financial marketers in the here and now.
So, the fundamental question remains: how do today’s financial services institutions make it through this current storm? How do they market their services and their value during this time of crisis and of uncertainty? I have several ideas.
 
1) Discover your true brand. Let your brand “be itself.”
As chief analyst of The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing, I spend plenty of time studying the trends and patterns of the industry. One of my functions is to speak with CMOs and marketing leaders to make sense of it all or at least to connect the dots to suggest the direction that the financial marketing industry is moving.
So, I offer parental-sounding advice for financial marketers: “Be yourself and everything will work out fine.” Financial consumers today want straight talk, and they are not going to be sold any product or service if the promise does not match up to reality. Since firms cannot change what they are in the short run, they must pay attention to the brand promises they are making with great caution. Clients and customers want the real deal.
The first step for your financial brand to be itself is knowing your own financial brand from the inside out. Brands today have to be authentic. “You’ve got to be real,” comments Eileen Sutton, principal at Sutton Creative, a branding firm based in New York. “Financial firms have got to connect with their customers.”
But financial clients and customers have become cynical. They demand the truth without gloss or embellishment. Addressing financial customers in an authentic voice underscores a much needed mutual respect between customer and financial institution.
“Financial services customers are looking for authenticity — the ‘real deal’ from their institutions,” states Bruce Goldberg, CMO of the International Securities Exchange. “We are living in cynical times, and financial clients and customers have every right to be so. They don’t want to be sold. They want to choose, and they want the truth from their institutions in order to make the right choice. I think in general there is a lack of trust and it has to be built.”says Goldberg.
Carrie Sackett’s job as a communications executive with Mercer Human Resource Management focuses on internal audiences. “In this day and age, the brand starts from within and emanates out. Your brand is what you are — not what some consultant wants it to be,” she says.
Sackett knows what she’s talking about. In her past role at Deloitte, LLP, she masterminded an internal communications initiative that engaged thousands of Deloitte employees to create video shorts all on the same subject: “My Deloitte.” Participants then entered films for judging (via Deloitte intranet) by the company at large. The result was the creation of thousands of Deloitte brand ambassadors. More to my point, they discovered their true brand from the inside out.
The financial brands that understand who they are and can extrapolate their identity into their brand communications will be able to make reasonable promises and deliver on them. And I believe this authenticity is what their clients and customers ultimately want in their relationship with their institution.
 
2) Connect with customers as personally as possible.
Eileen Sutton points out that local and regional banks have become the victors in the downturn. “They are using personal and real relationships to underscore essential values that are being conveyed to financial services customers,” she says.
In a research paper titled “Customer Advocacy 2008: How U.S. Consumers Rate Their Banks, Brokerages and Insurers,” Boston-based Forrester Research revealed that “consumers who rate their financial services providers high on ‘customer advocacy’ (the belief that their institutions are true advocates for their behalf) are more likely to consider those firms for additional financial products.”
Bill Doyle, who is a principal analyst at Forrester, spoke to JFAM recently and stated that if customers have bad experiences with their companies, no amount of positive advertising will make up for that. “Customers are smart. They know how you treat them. The best you can do with marketing is to reinforce the truth,” he says. “If you want to change how you are perceived, start by treating customers better, and then use advertising to reinforce the way they’re being treated.”
Connecting with customers is not a concept reserved exclusively for smaller financial institutions and field representatives. However, the larger institutions took their eyes off the ball in better times. Customers have become objectified and, to some degree, taken for granted. Now, as marketers retreat and many larger financial firms are inking new strategies for leaner times, the customer re-enters the picture. While this explanation may sound simplistic, it is. However, the customer has been overlooked.
David Corr, executive vice president and creative director at Publicis (a major global advertising agency handling a number of well-known financial brands), stresses that the job of the creative professional is to build relationships between brands and their consumers. “It’s not about transactions, it’s really about relationships,” he says. “I think in order to have a relationship, you have to be on the same wave length.”
Denise Waggoner, vice president of creative research at Getty Images, emphasizes the importance and value of imagery for building relationships with consumers. “Through our own extensive visual research and analysis, we have identified that ‘Guru Joe’ is essential to the idea of building trust to the ‘guy next door’ that is becoming evident in financial marketing. There is a level of authenticity that comes particularly from portraiture. ‘Guru Joe’ is a real face, a real person who can be an aspiration, but not out of reach,” Waggoner states. Getty Images is a leading digital media company based in Seattle providing still imagery, footage, music and multimedia products to millions of marketing professionals around the world.
Getty’s creative research team recently conducted a study of the financial advertising industry analyzing the state of visual communications and suggests key directions in which it is heading. “Financial Foresight: Opportunity and Visual Communications in Financial Services,” recognizes the forces that are out of the consumer’s control and recommends how they translate on a visual basis. The research is underpinned by analysis of the searches and choices of more than 1.5 million creative professionals on their website, as well as the review of thousands of commercials and other websites.
The time is now for financial marketers to work customer connections back into their strategies. Clients and customers feel trampled and require delicate handling. There is significant opportunity for the financial institutions that care enough to connect meaningfully with their customers. This goes far beyond a meeting or a phone call. It is the approach by which a financial institution communicates with their customers and creates an open door policy that underscores a  confidence in them that “my firm is there for me.”
 
3) Be mindful of verbal and visual tone, respecting what is especially appropriate for the time.
I recently attended a group discussion during which one audience participant asked, “Remember Citi’s ‘Live Richly’ campaign?” The room suddenly erupted into laughter, which came from the fact that one of financial advertising’s most brilliant and successful campaigns is completely inappropriate for the times today. The very idea of a campaign revolving around a promise of “Living Richly” is so far from customer mindsets right now that laughter, presumably at ourselves, was the group’s only response.
Citi’s Mittnacht is aware and highly sensitive of the fact that different messaging is suitable for different times in financial services. “We’re talking about people’s money, people’s lives, and right now we’re talking about it at a time when they are concerned,” he says.
Financial marketers today must be aware that the messaging that might have worked only a few months ago might not work today in financial marketing. On both the business-to-business and consumer sides of financial, people are feeling the pain. “Sensitivity” is a good term to characterize how today’s marketers should carry out their work. What worked three or four years ago will most likely not resonate today with financial audiences. “The biggest issues that I see today are those of content and of character,” says Corr of Publicis. “We can’t be clueless about tone.”
“I have been amazed by how incongruous some of the financial advertising has been, given the current crisis,” says Lewis Goldman, CEO at New Media Consulting, and veteran marketer at Citi. He points to some of the “happy, upbeat messages” that Lehman and others used not long before the collapse. “Some financial service companies do get it,” he says. “Until the dust settles and a clear message for a post-crisis financial world can be developed, Prudential's ‘Rock’ advertising no longer looks out-of-date.”
“The tone of the conversation has to change,” says Mittnacht. “At the same time, there is a healing process and at some point, that turns. The person that is in communications has to be careful that they see the signs of trauma, seriousness and heaviness and that we don’t make that last too long because, at the end of the day, people want to be led out of that trauma. Somebody has to put the swagger back in the advertising and the financial industry and come out and say ‘it’s morning again in America.’ The company that understands when the moment is right and it’s time for that and really gets the tone of the message right (will benefit). It’s almost like trying to time the market. That’s kind of a hard thing to do.”
Waggoner of Getty Images agrees on the importance of tonality in advertising and in striking the right visual tone with financial clients. “Visually, I don’t think we have been in this spot since the days of the post-Enron scandal (combined with 9/11),” says Waggoner. “I think communicators, and those in advertising in particular, have a unique role now to build confidence and trust again. Concepts like ‘humility’ and ‘wisdom’ have started emerging.”
There are parallels in visual communications between today’s financial crisis and the period directly following the World Trade Center terrorist attacks of 2001. Waggoner says she recalls that one of the most significant visual shifts came when advertisers started using black and white photography.
“Black and white brings on a sense of nostalgia and trust, which is reminiscent of a simpler time. Post 9/11, boomers had a craving for nostalgia. This was the big indicator to me that times have changed,” says Waggoner.
“Before 9/11, the term ‘family’ was a term outside of the Top 10 (photos purchased from Getty). Post 9/11, we saw the term ‘family’ move up into the Top 10 — and then visually there was the shift,” she continues. “Visually, we saw the ‘child’ move to the forefront of financial marketing photography. In 2001, marketing photography pointed to Mom and Dad and little Betsy and Jimmy and possibly a dog. In the post 9/11 world, we saw the dog disappear, as focus was on terms such as the child, protection, security and future.”
Waggoner cautions that we are living in sensitive times today. They are not too dissimilar from the times after 9/11.
“Finding the emotional vein that’s appropriate,” is especially important for Mittnacht, he says, adding that true creativity in advertising is very human. “It might not resemble that ‘wacky’ creativity. It might be very human, the authentic voice, and that’s as big a challenge. It’s the difference between writing a humorous or a dramatic novel. It’s all creative art and requires the best of people.”
 
4) Focus on value and deliver it.
The challenge for banks and financial services institutions has always been to deliver real value to their stakeholders. Therefore, the burden of the financial marketer in 2009 is a heavy one. The role of the forward-moving financial marketer is to pull the U.S.’s leading institutions out of this current credit — and credibility — crisis and collectively restore order and some degree of understanding to the world financial markets. Simply, the financial marketer must communicate value.
“The big word that is being used in every meeting that I walk into is ‘value’ and that is probably the most significant thing that (creatives) are trying to offer. “Whether it’s BMW or even Charmin, ‘value’ is the term these days,” says David Corr.
So, how, specifically, do marketers at the world’s leading institutions market their value in a crisis economy? This is something that I am unequipped to recommend beyond suggesting that you, as marketers, ask a critical question of yourself and your team. If the roles were reversed, would you pay for the services of your own financial firm? If not, why not? Now fix the problem. Money is serious business, especially in down times.
“If anything comes out of this,” says Bruce Goldberg, “you need to understand what it is you are doing with money, and it is serious. As organizations, we all have relationships with our customers. They are asking: ‘Do I have a relationship or do I feel misled?’ I think it is going to be difficult but it has to be worked out.”
“In the years ahead, value is what it is all about in financial marketing,” says Eileen Sutton. “Those financial firms that can deliver it will emerge as our next generation of leaders.”
 
Thanks to David Corr, executive vice president, creative director, Publicis; Bill Doyle, senior analyst, Forrester Research; Bruce Goldberg, CMO, The International Securities Exchange; Lewis Goldman, CEO, New Media Consulting; Jon Mittnacht, director of advertising, Citi Wealth Management; Carrie Sackett, principal, Mercer Human Resources Management; Eileen Sutton, principal, Sutton Creative; and Denise Waggoner, vice president for creative research, Getty Images, in sharing thinking in the preparation of this piece.
JFAM extends special gratitude to The Deal, LLC as well as the IABC (New York) in bringing several of these thought leaders together for events moderated by The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing. Also, JFAM wishes to thank Getty Images, Inc. for use of photos in this report.
For more information on Forrester Research’s “Customer Advocacy 2008: How U.S. Consumers Rate Their Banks, Brokerages and Insurers,” visit www.forrester.com.

To download a copy of Getty Images’ “Financial Foresight: Opportunity and Visual Communications in Financial Services” research study, a copy is available for free at www.gettyimages.com/smart. Photos used in this report are the copyrighted property of Getty Images, Inc. and may not be used without written permission of Getty Images, Inc.

TOP FINANCIAL MARKETING LEADERS MET AT JFAM:LIVE!
AT THE AUDITORIUM OF UBS IN NEW YORK CITY

 

·         Over 120 Financial Marketing Leaders Met at UBS’s Gallery Auditorium in NYC

·         Conference Theme: The Beginning of the End—Now What?

·         Speakers Include Top Marketers from: Goldman Sachs, Prudential Financial, Legg Mason, UBS, BMO Capital Markets, Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management, FXCM, SunTrust Banks, CashNet, USA, MetLife, E*TRADE Financial, Ameriprise Financial, Guardian Life Insurance, JG Wentworth, Oppenheimer Funds and Nomura Holdings

·         Consortium of Top Financial Marketing Firms Announced at JFAM:Live!
 
NEW YORK, NY (September 16, 2009)—“The downturn in financial markets has now bottomed-out,” predicted Bill Wreaks, Chief Analyst of The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing (JFAM). “Marketers from the world’s top financial services firms must now adapt accordingly to a new world order in financial marketing.” This year at JFAM:Live! Financial Marketers’ Conference, The Gramercy Institute brought together over 120 leaders in financial services marketing to the New York Auditorium of UBS. Attendees and presenters will discuss and debate what has changed in financial services marketing in the past year, what changes are likely yet to come, and how financial services marketers can and should adapt to meet new challenges in 2010—and beyond.
 
The theme of this conference was: The Beginning of the End—Now What? JFAM:Live! agenda highlights include:
·         Financial Advisor Preferences
·         The Image of Global Banks
·         The Great Trust Switch: Assessing Scale and Trust in Volatile Markets
·         Marketing The Financial Brand--The Right Size For The Right Time
·         Brave New Financial-The Agency of The Future
·         Breaking Through: The New Financial Customer
·         Brand Challenge: Being Big in 2010
·         The New Medium: Custom Publishing in Financial Services
·         2010—Delivering Real Value in Financial Media
·         What’s Changed? Business Marketing in Financial
·         Analyst Perspective: Today’s Media Landscape
 
“There was no question,” reports Wreaks, “that we assembled one of the strongest line-ups of speakers--ever. This is an unusual climate for financial marketers; there’s a lot to share—and a lot to learn.” The event specifically tapped the intelligence of leaders from top global financial brands such as: Goldman Sachs, Prudential Financial, Legg Mason, UBS, BMO Capital Markets, Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management, FXCM, SunTrust Banks, CashNet, USA, MetLife, E*TRADE Financial, Ameriprise Financial, Guardian Life Insurance, JG Wentworth, Oppenheimer Funds and Nomura Holdings. 
 
In addition, agency brands such as DiMassimo Goldstein, Media Contacts, Doremus, ‘MKTG’ and Pace Communications offered their insights to JFAM:Live! attendees. Also, research experts from UBS, Rowan University, Financial Times, Compete, Inc. and The Gramercy Institute all presented to the group along with publishers and leaders from the world’s top financial media brands: Barron’s, The Deal, the Financial Times, InvestingChannel, Vibrant Media and AOL Advertising.
 
The JFAM Financial Marketing Conference was sponsored by: (Platinum Sponsors) Financial Times, AOL Advertising and UBS, (Gold Sponsors) Compete, Inc., DiMassimo Goldstein, Media Contacts, ‘MKTG’, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Vibrant Media, The Wall Street Journal (Supporting Sponsor) InvestingChannel and (Luncheon Sponsor) Barron’s.
 
Brave New Financial: “Charter” Firms Announced
At JFAM:Live!, The Gramercy Institute announced “charter members” of Brave New Financial consortium. This best practices consortium has been hand-selected by The Gramercy Institute as a collection those firms that are particularly well-suited to handle the marketing needs of today’s leading financial firms. This group will remain close confidants of The Gramercy Institute to determine trends in financial services marketing and will be regularly asked to share insights with leading financial firms. The Gramercy Institute announced its first five (of twelve) members at JFAM:Live!
 
About The Gramercy Institute
The conference was organized by The Gramercy Institute. The company specializes in issues surrounding financial services marketing. TGI clients include Barron’s, Bloomberg Media, CNBC, Compete, Inc., Competitrack, Conde Nast, Crain’s, Doremus, Dow Jones, The Deal, Financial Times, Getty Images, Google, The International Herald Tribune, Investor’s Business Daily, InvestingChannel, Journal of Accountancy, Leadfusion, Microsoft Advertising, New York Times, The New Yorker, Nikkei America, Pearson Publishing, Pensions & Investments, TargetCast tcm, TIAA-CREF, Vibrant Media, Yahoo! The Wall Street Journal Interactive, Zillow.com Yellow Pages Association, and others.
 
The Gramercy Institute publishes The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing, a printed professional quarterly devoted to sharing expert opinions in and about the financial marketing industry. The company also manages The Financial Marketers’ Alliance, a network comprising over 1100 financial marketing professionals, worldwide and through its Gramercy Institute hosts numerous events each year around financial marketing-related topics.
 
Based in New York, the company (www.financialmarketer.com), is separated into three distinct areas: Publishing, Network & Events, and Research & Consulting
 
Contact:
Bill Wreaks
212-753-5131
bill@financialadvertising.com

 

FINANCIAL MARKETERS' ALLIANCE (FMA)
2009 FINANCIAL MARKETING EVENTS
(subject to revision)
               
REQUEST MORE INFORMATION ON ATTENDING OR SPONSORING ANY OF THESE EVENTS
 
OR EMAIL US

 

 
  
Please forward me more information.
 
Or Call: 212.752.0151
events@financialadvertising.com
www.financialmarketer.com 
 
The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing is published quarterly by The Wreaks Media Group. Copyright ©2008
 
To subscribe to The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing, please click here
                                               
 
 
The Gramercy Institute | 275 Madison Avenue | 6th Floor | New York | NY | 10016
 
 

 

Wednesday Evening, September 15, 2009—New York, NY JFAM/FMA Strategic Philanthropy Award Reception.  JFAM and The FMA will celebrate excellence in “strategic philanthropy” in financial services by awarding the first annual JFAM Strategic Philanthropy Award at a special reception to a leading financial services marketer. 
 
Thursday, September 16, 2009—New York, NY JFAM:Live! Financial Marketing Conference
Sponsored by Bloomberg Media, Financial Times and AOL/Platform-A, Getty Images Vibrant Media and others, this major conference includes top speakers from all areas of financial marketing.  JFAM:Live! is a arguably the most concentrated gathering of senior marketers  from major financial institutions today. Speakers at this event hail from top financial institutions and consultancies (for example, speakers already committed are senior marketers from brands such as AIG, Barclay’s  iShares, Doremus, Mercer, Bank of America, Nomura Securities, Merrill Lynch, refinance.com, E*TRADE, Blackrock, Nuveen, Prudential).  This is a not-to-be-missed event. 
 
Tuesday, September 29, 2009--Boston, MA,  Brave New World--Communicating The Financial Brand.  JFAM teams up with the Financial Times in Boston to bring financial marketers critical insights into the strategies, tactics and new opportunities of communicating the financial brand to clients and customers in 2009--and beyond.
 
 
Wednesday, October 14, 2009—New York, NY, Creative in Financial Advertising Breakfast. JFAM teams up with The Deal to bring together leading creative minds over breakfast  for discussion and debate for the fifth year in a row. Topic: Creativity in Financial Advertising. Moderator: Bill Wreaks, Chief Analyst, The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing.  Panelists include leading creative directors and seasoned financial services marketers.
 
Wednesday, October 21, 2009—San Francisco, CA, JFAM’s  Financial Marketers Alliance Breakfast: San Francisco.  JFAM teams up with the Financial Times in San Francisco to convene leading minds for discussion and debate. Moderator: Bill Wreaks, Chief Analyst, The Journal of Financial Advertising & Marketing. 
 
Wed.-Friday, December 2-4 2009—Lodge at Torrey Pines, La Jolla, CA The Annual JFAM Financial Marketing Summit: WEST Approximately 45 senior marketing executives meet for this high level financial marketing summit. Presentations from top financial marketers, academics and consultants. 
 

January 18th, JFAM Media Strategy Awards--Entries Due.  Financial marketers and agencies compete on a strategic level.  Who's doing it right in media strategy in 2009 and 2010?  Enter your media strategy in The JFAM Media Strategy Awards by December 18th, 2009.  Contact: swreaks@financialadvertising.com for more information.  Or call: 212-752-0151. The Financial Times is the founding sponsor of this important event.

About The Research:
“Risky Business: Opportunity and Visual Communications in Financial Services”

An Interview with Denise Waggoner, V.P., Creative Research at Getty Images, Inc.

Getty Images has developed a detailed report that points out the visual trends that are developing in the financial services marketing industry in a report titled “Risky Business: Opportunity and Visual Communications in Financial Services.”
JFAM recently caught up with Denise Waggoner, VP, Creative Research at Getty Images to discuss the details and implications to the financial marketing industry.

To download (at no charge) a copy of this image-rich report, go to: http://imagery.gettyimages.com/FinancialServices/usa/index.html?esource=JFAM_FM_USA  

  

JFAM: In the big picture, what can the study of the images that our society embraces tell us about ourselves that the study of numbers or words cannot?

WAGGONER: Oh! That's such a great question – a great big question, in fact. I’ll try to be objective or at least try to hide my enthusiasm. There are only a handful of mediums that can elicit an instant emotional connection. A single still image can take you backwards or forwards or challenge your point of view. It can make your heart sing and it can make you cry, all in a moment. And you don't have to be a professional to experience it. You only have to see it.

Numbers on the other hand are absolute, safe and sometimes confining. There is less room for interpretation. Two plus two will always be four. I think the last time I got emotional about a “four” was when I turned 40. 

And words? Words are luscious and luxurious and can do all the things that pictures can, too, but in most cases, it takes longer to tell the story. 

And one last point, but it's an important one. pictures are universal. I don't need to study a language to experience sadness over the devastation in China. I only need an image to take me there.

So what then can we learn about ourselves? By studying images, we can learn a lot about how we see ourselves and how we'd like to see ourselves. For example, in times of strife we see more images of family emerge, often with the child at the forefront of the image as a symbol of the future. And that's a global phenomenon. That's what's so fascinating. 

It’s not like there's some top secret global picture rule book that says “When the going gets tough, the tough use pictures of family to sell their products.” It happens because family means security, stability, love, community, connection, hope. And even if we don't have those things, we aspire to have them. It’s where we as humans turn, and it’s where we as people who sell products and services turn, too.

JFAM: Research companies develop and put forth trend reports in financial services marketing all the time. What makes Getty’s “Risky Business” report so unique? 

WAGGONER: “Risky Business” is unique in that it recognizes the forces out of consumer’s control and recommends how that might pan out visually. It essentially says, “here are the factors going on in the world today, here's what it looks like around the globe, and here's how we see the visual language moving forward and how you can connect with your customer, visually.”

 

JFAM: Specifically, what’s different about Getty’s methodology from what we’ve seen before in the marketing research world?

WAGGONER: The marketing research world is an amazing place for data, statistics, behaviors, shifts, evolutions and predictions. Tapping into it is part of our methodology. Where we differ is the marriage of that data to visual behaviors. Through our website we can visually track customer buying patterns by industry, subject and concept. Through our global outreach, we can determine visually what's happening in a lot of different countries. So we have the opportunity to ask ourselves: “How are marketers and advertisers communicating in China, Brazil, Japan, Germany, India, (the) U.S., (the) U.K. and Australia?” And like everyone else, we watch for the big stuff too: the economy, the election, the war, global warming. It’s these things combined that teach us how to breathe visual life into a statistic. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

 

JFAM: Why might Getty Images’ methodology be a particularly accurate reflection of what’s “really happening” in the ad business and in the financial world?

WAGGONER: I suppose it’s because of the things I mentioned above. We’re in this really unique and very exciting position to visually look back at where we came from. Literally look at where we are today, study where we are today, listen to what's going on today and determine where then where we might go tomorrow.

 

JFAM: Did any of the trends you have identified in the report really surprise you?

Waggoner: Yes, I was surprised at the emergence of risk as a positive concept; that it was tied to knowledge and expertise and not with being careless. I thought, “what a lovely and fresh way to approach an image and a communication.” 

 JFAM: Were any of these trends particularly predictable? 
WAGGONER: I don’t know that they were predictable as much as they were or are cominginto their own. Examples in particular are boomers and women. There are loads of statistics and psychographics running around about these two demographics, but we haven't yet seen them visually dominate as they should, particularly as it compares to their spending power. We've been pushing that visual agenda forward for awhile now, in hopes that we have enough of the right pictures to meet what we believe will be a continued rise in demand.

 

JFAM: What’s going on in the world today (such as trends and shifts) that you feel has particularly affected the outcome of Getty’s findings in this report?

WAGGONER:  I would say there were bigger forces than normal that affected the outcome of this report. When we look briefly at the end of 2007 and top of 2008 at sub-prime and the “R-word” (recession) and they were at the forefront of our minds. And though we’re only in an “economic slow down,” the price of a barrel of oil continues to set records and the stock market swings up and down. 

Oh, it's also an election year. And that tax break – well, how much gas is that really going to buy? There is a whole lot of stuff going on. If the economy were stronger and gas was under $4, the election was over, and – let’s get crazy and say we were out of Iraq, we would be having a whole new visual discussion. We respond to pictures differently in times of great confidence versus the less certain times we feel we are living in now.
 
 
Getty Images is an industry-leading digital media provider offering award-winning images, assignment photography, video and film footage, music and flexible services to help you work more effectively. Getty Images serves business customers in more than 100 countries and its products are found each day in the full range of traditional and digital media worldwide.

Risky Business: Opportunity and Visual Communications in Financial Services" is available for download, at no charge, at: http://imagery.gettyimages.com/FinancialServices/usa/index.html?esource=JFAM_FM_USA.

 

 

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
(and a whole lot more to financial marketers!)
 

By Kip Fry

• Getty Images Inc., Releases New Study-- Tends in Visual Communications within Financial Services Marketing
• New Bellwether for Directional Guidance in Financial Marketing
• Ten Key Trends Identified, Directional Advice Offered to Financial Ad Leaders
• Download Report Now (No Charge): http://imagery.gettyimages.com/FinancialServices/usa/index.html?esource=JFAM_FM_USA

 
 
In 1921, Fred R. Barnard wrote in an advertising trade journal called Printer’s Ink that “one look is worth a thousand words.” His catch phrase was later adjusted by him in an ad to read, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”* This expression has become commonplace in the English language. Somewhat reminiscent of a Chinese proverb, rumor has it that Barnard intentionally attributed his new slogan to a Chinese proverb to lend credibility to his statement. After all, he was promoting the use of images in advertising.
 

Although it appears that Confucius was not the idea man behind this famous adage, it is more relevant than ever to 21st century advertising. 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what could hundreds of thousands of images possibly be worth to the financial marketing industry? Could they offer significant meaning to a student of human behavior? Can the study of the images that financial advertising professionals choose to place in their work suggest visual trends in the financial services marketing industry today? Getty Images has proven that the answer is “yes.” More importantly, Getty Images has offered guidance to financial marketing professionals based on these very trends.

Getty Images is an industry-leading digital media provider to millions of professionals. The company believes that the collective wisdom of its clientele (agency and marketing professionals) can be tapped to provide the financial advertising industry with glimpses into the state of visual communications and suggest key directions in which it is heading.

Getty Images' analysis applies concepts and findings from the macro level in what it calls “MAP” reports, which take their name from the mantra, “Everything that happens in the world makes a picture.” Developed from the work of the company's global creative research team, the reports are underpinned by analysis of the searches and choices of more than 1.5 million creative professionals on their website, as well as the review of thousands of tear sheets, commercials and other websites.

 As a result, Getty Images has developed a detailed analysis that points out the visual trends that are developing in the financial services marketing industry in a report titled “Risky Business: Opportunity and Visual Communications in Financial Services.”

“‘Risky Business’ is unique in that it recognizes the forces out of the consumer’s control and recommends how that translates visually,” commented Denise Waggoner, vice president for creative research at Getty Images.

Risk is just one of 10 key elements that the creative researchers have uncovered, which can be personified through images. Many customers tend to avoid it, while others thrive on it and, as a result, seek it out. In that sense, it is balanced. “We are seeing less imagery centered purely on the concepts of adventure and fun.” the report states. “When we do see adventure, it is held steady by concepts such as balance and challenge.”

The report showcases a print ad for Allianz, the worldwide insurance and asset management company that shows a sailboat with the caption: “Knowing when to turn is essential. It’s what keeps your business in safe hands.” The sailboat dominates the top half of the ad, while a photo of a wheel is on the bottom. What could be the boat’s wheel is actually the lock of an immense bank safe. The boat represents the risk while the wheel (whichever form you want to take) is the solution. “You can take risks knowing you are in safe hands; there’s a balance of risk and safety. In terms of messaging, it’s a home run,” the report concludes. “Risk is not only significant to specific financial service products, but it is now an integral part of the culture at large, and quality imagery is core to communications around risk, providing an effective emotional anchor.”

“I was surprised at the emergence of risk as a positive concept; that it was tied to knowledge and expertise and not with being careless. I thought what a lovely and fresh way to approach an image and a communication,” comments Waggoner.

Pictures must also be balanced, what Getty calls the “anchorage” of the picture. This gives the viewers a sense of security in a time when they feel vulnerable and in peril. “Those wanting to establish a deeper and lasting connection with consumers need to work with imagery around solidity and balance,” the report states. 

These different features can work together to tell a story visually. If a consumer feels uncertain about what he or she is looking at, images can bring ideas together into something concrete and understandable. People will see much more of this in the future and will help make themes seem more approachable. The writers of the report consider it to be “the most compelling” form of communications and is an continuation of the testimonial trend, a visual style that was identified several years ago.

“Visual storytelling immediately emotionally engages, and creates the impression of direction, of character and the pleasure of resolution,” the report says. “In a world where consumers are constantly on the go, pressed for time, never quite able to clear their desks, visual storytelling presents the gift of completeness, of an ending.”

There are seven other factors that come into play. Getty Images has also found that portraits are among their best sellers and provide a certain amount of connection, intimacy and solidity. These are “all virtues you would associate with trust and credibility,” two components that are crucial when marketing financial institutions. In fact, among the company's top 500 selling images, more than half (51 percent) are portraits.

When looking at financial advertising, it is no longer common to see pictures of company executives. More likely, the images will be of what is known as “Guru Joe.” This is defined as “an individual who is confident, who knows what he is doing and where he is going, and who people can trust and connect with.”

Nader Ashway, president and CEO of The Ashway Group in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., sees this as a major component of modern advertising.

“While we once used to put the most beautiful and interesting looking people in our ads, we now show average, uninteresting or even unattractive people in part due to a recognition of the previous strategy’s failure, and in part, due to the trust trend,” he says. “You can’t really trust a supermodel to be genuine, but you can probably get a straight answer out of Average Joe.” 

Several other types of specific images are becoming more noticeable. Pictures of women symbolize consistency, loyalty and security, while niche celebrities are used in areas of their own expertise. This will “generate a meaningful brand experience,” according to the report. 

Images of people multitasking in the office are less visible than those of people. Many images in 2008 center on workers doing one task and doing it well. The old trend of trying to do several jobs at the same time is no longer applicable. So the imagery shows them doing just one thing--monotasking. Multitasking simply stressed out too many people in the workplace. That is not what advertisers want to show, especially in the corporate world.

It also has played a large role in the financial workplace as Ashway asserts.

“It (multitasking) started with the big bad ’80s and almost hedonistic financial aspirations to the even bigger realization in the 1990s of what’s financially possible with the dot boom,” Ashway says. “It just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and then, as in a flash of dust blown by a closing door, we’re back to single-mindedness, and peace and tranquility and the simple pleasures that a financial life may someday afford. It’s like going back to your bedroom from childhood – while it looks remarkably different, it’s clear that the room hasn’t changed. You have. And that’s what I see with this slight shift, or realignment, in financial advertising: We’ve changed and that makes all the difference in the way we’ll communicate on a commercial level.” 

There is also an attraction to baby boomers. As opposed to many people who seek out things nostalgic, boomers do not want to live in earlier eras. They simply like the adventure of living in 2008 and discovering everything it has to offer culturally. They are not so apt to be moved by images from earlier eras because they must be put into other contexts. 

Finally, despite all the recent emphasis on the environment, green issues have not really been addressed in finserv advertising. Anything with that theme should be relevant and credible. One way to do that is with animals. 

The way that happens, according to the report, is when the animals represent something like wisdom. Or maybe it is the law of the jungle, much like the old Dreyfus ads from the ’50s with the lion roaming Wall Street so nonchalantly. But as can be seen with the GEICO gecko and the Aflac duck, creatures can mean so much more.

How does this all work together?

When things get too risky for consumers, they are apt to look for anchorage. They want to find a place in their world that they like and in which they are comfortable, otherwise known as “nesting.” As a result, pictures are often taken of things that are in balance, because that is what people seek for their own lives.

Perhaps one of the most successful financial ad campaigns going these days is the “Priceless” series for MasterCard. It captures both the essence of commerce and the human story that makes it so appealing. Getty states: “You can trust the company as an institution, but it’s the human stuff that has true value, real currency. MasterCard’s campaign is a case study in visual and emotional engagement.”

Waggoner sees the research as being helpful for understanding imagery. “We have the opportunity to ask ourselves how marketers and advertisers are communicating in China, Brazil, Japan, Germany, India, (the) U.S., (the) U.K., and Australia,” she said. “It’s these things combined that teach us how to breathe visual life into a statistic. That’s what we’re trying to do here.” 

This sort of data is especially thrilling for Waggoner to have in her hands.

“We’re in this really unique and very exciting position to visually look back at where we came from. To literally look at where we are today, study where we are today, listen to what’s going on today and determine where we might go tomorrow.” she said.

So what does all this mean to financial advertising? Getty discusses what is called the X2 economy (eXperience times eXpectation). When we go to a movie, our experience in the darkened theater depends on the expectations we hold going into it. This can be used in advertising, as well. Consumers expect certain things from brands they are purchasing (the experience), and this can be seen through the image.

If a picture is so valuable, what could hundreds of thousands of images possibly be worth to the financial marketing industry? It might not be advisable to count the answer in dollars, but instead with the insight, direction and advice they provide.

Out of the 10 trends that Getty Images pointed to in its “Risky Business” study, there is guidance to share as well. Getty Images believes that there are a number of visual concepts in which advertisers and clients in the financial services sector need to present themselves over the next 18 months. These are the categories toward which the visual language is moving. That list includes balance, connection, dedication, dreams, excellence, expertise, future, goals, growth, guidance, innovation, integrity, journey, leadership, nurturing, partnership, reliability, responsive, service, teamwork, togetherness, trust, vision and winning. 

There are also many variables that can affect the interpretation of visual imagery. People need to remember that the many geopolitical events that take place around the world every day, such as rising gas prices and the war in Iraq, make a large a large difference in how we understand things, according to Waggoner.

“We respond to pictures differently in times of great confidence versus the less certain times we feel we are living in now,” she says. That may be the biggest variable of all. 

To download a copy (at no charge) of this image-rich PDF report go to: http://imagery.gettyimages.com/FinancialServices/usa/index.html?esource=JFAM_FM_USA.

Words don’t do justice to what you’ll see.

 

 

 

Getty Images is an industry-leading digital media provider offering award-winning images, assignment photography, video and film footage, music and flexible services to help you work more effectively. Getty Images serves business customers in more than 100 countries and its products are found each day in the full range of traditional and digital media worldwide.

 

Risky Business: Opportunity and Visual Communications in Financial Services" is available for download, at no charge, at: http://imagery.gettyimages.com/FinancialServices/usa/index.html?esource=JFAM_FM_USA.
 
*Printers' Ink, 8 Dec., 1921, p. 96. and March 10, 1927, p. 114