State Street’s asset management arm rebranded from Global Advisors to State Street Investment Management after more than 30 years, reflecting its expanded and diversified client base.
The rebrand aims to clarify the firm’s value proposition, communicate its services more clearly and align closely with the broader State Street brand.
While institutional clients remain core, the firm now serves financial advisers, intermediaries and retail investors, particularly through ETFs.
The initiative is supported by the “Getting There Starts Here” campaign and internal engagement efforts, which are designed to create a unified client experience and reinforce the firm’s positioning as an essential partner in helping clients achieve their financial goals.
Anyone who boarded public transport in a major European city in the run-up to Christmas may have seen it before they even realised what they were looking at.
A tram wrapped end-to-end in crisp, brightly coloured branding. Digital billboards in train stations catching eyes as commuters bustled past. Even the floor beneath their feet, splashed with iterations of the message: “Wherever you’re going, getting there starts here.” Another line, just as simple but just as bold: “Our direction? Yours?”
For commuters in London, Milan, Amsterdam and beyond, these weren’t ads that were scrolled past or eagerly skipped after five seconds. They were woven into the rhythm of daily life, embedded into the paths people take to get from one place to another. Literally, in the case of the subway flooring, where each step reinforced the message.
For the brand behind them, State Street Investment Management, that was precisely the point. By placing the campaign in high-footfall transport hubs, the firm ensured its message intersected with people at the start of their journeys — both literal and metaphorical.
Building on its core slogan, “Getting there starts here,” the campaign draws a clever parallel between physical journeys and financial ones. Every wrapped tram, every branded floor and every station billboard acts as a reminder that every journey, whether personal, professional or financial, begins with taking the first step.
By embedding the brand into the flow of daily movement, Peter Kent, managing director for EMEA, explains how State Street Investment Management has turned the simple act of commuting into a moment of reflection: where are you going, and who can help you get there?
A brand on the move
Launched in late 2025, the eye-catching and refreshingly clever campaign marked one of State Street’s most visible brand statements in Europe in recent memory.
It spanned public transport hubs and vehicles across multiple major cities: brand-clad trams, digital billboards in train stations, taxi and ferry placements.
Each asset in the multi-lingual campaign riffed on State Street Investment Management’s core slogan of “Getting there starts here”, introduced just a few years ago and showcased the accumulated value of a sticky, ever-relevant slogan.
The creative leaned into the simple parallel between physical journeys and financial ones. Every commute starts with the first step; so too does every investment journey. It’s a framing that seems almost obvious and lends itself to an out-of-home location, as well as State Street’s growing retail audience.
“We want to be the essential partner to our clients, which comes through in our scale, expertise, focus on partnership… It speaks to the fact that we are on a journey with our clients through the long term,” Says Kent.
Translate that into the emotive language of brand and advertising, and viola: Getting there starts here. “That concept of being on a journey works really well when you think about out-of-home,” Kent adds.
Why out-of-home, and why now?
In a world dominated by digital advertising, launching a large-scale physical campaign might seem out of step. But, that sense of doing something different was exactly the appeal, according to Kent.
Not only was it a different approach from State Street’s competitors, but it also marked a deliberate shift from the firm’s own previous approach. Over the past year, State Street has put on an impressive marketing show. By its own numbers, the firm delivered more than 500 events, generating tens of thousands of leads across EMEA alone. But much of that activity, Kent explains, has been hyper-targeted.
“Most of our marketing has been quite bottom-up and thought leadership-led, and due to the nature of that, quite heavily targeted” he says.
Therefore, Kent pushed to take a different approach, which was focused on “being in the right place at the right time with the right message for the right person.”
Traditionally, marketing in this sector has often followed a predictable pattern of a piece of thought leadership, an email and an event, supported by digital activity.
It’s a familiar playbook for asset managers operating in today’s crowded market: digital-first and lead-driven, with a relentless focus on ROI.
While effective to a point, Kent says that approach can be limiting, even when digital channels are part of the equation, because it does not consider the full mix of channels that are available. In addition, it focuses too much on what needs to be said, rather than fully considering where and how it should be heard.
The where was particularly important as internal research showed that while State Street’s heritage and brand strength are well understood in the US, that story isn’t landing as strongly in Europe, he adds.
So, the task was to get the word out across Europe, but the problem is asset managers can only tell so many people, so many times, what they do – especially if the audiences they are targeting don’t yet know who they are.
“There’s an awareness challenge: either people have not heard of us, or they have heard of us but they might just us as an index shop, when our offering is actually much broader. You actually can’t start attacking both of those challenges through hyper-targeted digital activity,” Kent says.
“For this campaign, we wanted to test the water on the bigger, top-down campaign messaging,” he adds. “It’s not a binary. We’re not shutting the door on our right place, right time messaging. We’re adding above the line into the mix.”
The campaign also landed at a moment of change for State Street’s identity.
Earlier in 2025, the firm completed a rebrand, moving away from its long-standing name State Street Global Advisors – which it had carried for more than three decades – to State Street Investment Management.
The change aimed to improve awareness among a broader investor audience. While institutional clients remain core, the explosive growth of ETFs has transformed the investment industry. State Street now serves hundreds of thousands of intermediaries and advisers globally, as well as a growing cohort of retail investors who access its products directly via online brokerages.
The brand needed to reflect that broader audience and be explicit about what it actually does, hence the brand adoption of ‘Investment Management’.
Breaking into Europe
Given State Street’s status as an American in Europe, localisation was an imperative for the initiative. A homogenous, single-language campaign simply wasn’t going to work.
Instead, the team focused on contextual relevance, tailoring the copy by both country and mode of transport, according to Kent.
“Whether it was a train or a boat, the lines changed to reflect it,” he explains. “We spoke to people in their language and with their cultural sensitivities.”
Some of the nuances were obvious; others less so. “There are a lot of colloquialisms in English, perhaps even more so in the UK than the US,” he laughs. Take ‘Where to, guv?’ splashed across London’s black cabs. “It was totally lost on our Bostonian colleagues.”
Italian, too, posed its own challenges, he adds. Readers who speak Italian can imagine the difficulty of translating the familiar ‘ding ding’ sound of a bus stop bell to be fit for a tram in Milan.
“We worked with our local offices to adapt to the nuances,” Kent says. The result is a campaign that achieves that rare balance of global brand, local voice.
Stretching a modest budget
For a campaign of its scale, Kent says the spend was restrained.
“There were budget constraints,” he admits. “It was a relatively small investment in out-of-home, but we spent it in an extremely clever way.”
Rather than blanket-buying premium inventory, the team focused on remnant space around transport hubs, with a few selective high-impact placements.
“The idea was to get as much bang for our buck as possible, focused on actual methods of transport – taxis, ferries, trains and trams,” Kent adds.
The creative flexed accordingly, with language that evokes the bumpy ride on an Amsterdam ferry, giving directions when hopping into a taxi and the stop buttons on a red London bus. Each time, it returned to the same emotional core: the journey.
“We’re deliberately trying to play up that element,” Kent says. “Being there through the ups and downs of life with our clients.”
Start to finish in seven weeks
Perhaps the most striking part of the story is how quickly it all came together. From concept to execution, the campaign was delivered in under seven weeks across one of the most complex regions in developed markets.
“Honestly, it was a big shift,” Kent says of getting it over the line.
To deliver the campaign so quickly, Kent says he drew inspiration from Spotify. The streaming platform is famous for putting agile working on the map. It relies on small, autonomous ‘squads’ drawn from different functions, empowered to deliver with flexibility and autonomy.
“Right at the start of the campaign, I created a squad with all the relevant sign-off requirements. We had all the specialist areas for delivering a campaign of this size: brand, copywriting, marketing, etc.,” he says.
“That agile framework enabled us to take a line item on a slide deck right from concept through to delivery in seven weeks. For an organisation as complex as State Street, in a region as complex as Europe, that was no mean feat.”
Kent adds that while this was the first time the State Street marketing team had adopted this model, it was far from new to him. With 15 years of experience in the startup world, he is well versed in taking an agile approach to delivering projects and navigating fast-moving environments.
A signal of things to come
The campaign isn’t a standalone effort. Instead, it acts as what Kent calls a “stake in the ground” for a broader reset in State Street’s approach to marketing. The industry’s obsession with short-form digital formats, he suggests, may be nearing saturation.
“There’s an element of audience fatigue,” he says.
“Sitting down and taking the time to absorb messaging at a deeper level – or reading a simple line that hangs around for longer – is a movement back to the more traditional modes of marketing. It might be what you see the industry moving to in 2026.”
Looking ahead, State Street plans to lean further into top-down brand campaigns, focusing on delivering fewer messages with greater impact.
“I want to make State Street famous for a few very clear things,” Kent says. “Rather than talking a little bit about everything and ultimately not having the right cut-through.”
The metrics are equally ambitious: improved share of voice, pipeline impact and, crucially, brand perception.
He notes this shift in strategy requires a change-friendly mindset from the boardroom, which thankfully has been fostered at State Street, particularly following the appointment of Yie-Hsin Hung as President and CEO in 2022.
“Cultural change is really difficult to achieve; it doesn’t happen overnight,” Kent says. “Her arrival and the strategy she set has really helped drive that change for the organisation.”
“I like working in organisations where you can make immediate change and see the fruits of your labour very quickly,” he adds. “Organisations where you’re just tweaking around the edges and driving efficiencies are less interesting to me.”
Of course, the mindset shift comes amid a period of change not just for State Street but for the asset management industry at large. As well as a democratising investor base, legacy firms are managing fervent competition, new distribution channels and a mammoth wealth transfer from Boomers to Millennials.
“Capturing that wealth transfer will be the key to tomorrow’s success for asset managers,” Kent says.
“Improving share of choice, being famous for fewer things, having more impact – those areas will drive success.”
So, what should readers look out for from State Street in 2026? Doubling down on out-of-home, with at least two more large-scale brand campaigns already in the works.
This story appeared in Issue 15 of the Financial Promoter magazine. To be one of the first to read it, subscribe here: Subscribe – Financial Promoter