At the end of this quarter, Rhotic Media – the owner of Financial Promoter and its sister title Capital Pioneer – will be eight years old.
In that time, we’ve worked with some of the world’s largest financial services brands across capital markets and personal finance, but also with some companies we have struggled to allocate to an appropriate pigeonhole.
The content/marketing projects we have taken on span campaign names (one word), tag lines (three words) and the longest chairman’s paper on investment anyone ever needed to write – and each required us to meet the challenge differently.
But that’s only half the story.
When we started out, as a few journalists with decent contact books, in-depth market knowledge and a couple of passes for a shared office, we were brief takers; copywriters; relayers of other people’s insight and information.
Yet, somewhere during the early, murky days of lockdown, the words on a page – or increasingly on a screen – became just the starting point for the work we began to take on.
If we were asset management Client X, how else could we showcase this investment idea?, we were asked. Or, how did we think the new strategic alignment between the transaction banking part of the business and digital team could be explained simply to customers who didn’t know they needed these services (let alone that our client offered them)? If we wanted to do a webinar on Client Y’s new approach to automating proxy voting and transfer agency, could Rhotic help us create the script and find participants?
At that point, we had two options.
Refuse the work and stick with our knitting. In our previous lives as journalists, no one ever asked us what we thought about anything (and nor should they).
Grasp what was needed and start skilling up.
I’m glad to say, we went with the second option and began position ourselves further up the famous financial services “value chain”. We began taking on increasingly complex projects that started with the strategic objectives of a campaign – sometimes even helping to identify and set them.
More quickly than we expected, value propositions and message houses became a regular bill o’fayre. At the same time, we were being brought into written campaigns from the much earlier “what should we tell them?” stage through the “where, how and when should we tell them?” and only then to our traditional “and here’s the copy” part of the deal.
But it didn’t happen by accident or osmosis. We have had to work at it. We put our teams on training courses; we put ourselves in positions where we had to learn and develop new skills – or come unstuck in front of a client.
Above all, we delved into what our clients were struggling with and repositioned our business to meet those needs. This also led to some horribly difficult decisions on how to structure our own set up – but no one ever said running a company was easy.
We learned burgeoning new areas – digital assets and tokenisation anyone? – brought on designers, events managers and a brand-new sales team, who were all keen to learn and grow too.
So, what has this got to do with marketing and comms?
If the agencies that serve the industry have changed so massively – and we’re not the only ones to have fundamentally shifted both business model and focus – then the industry must have changed by the same magnitudes as well.
And we hear every day from clients that this change is still happening.
This is why we must all keep learning, adapting and looking ahead for what comes next for us, the industry and our part within it.
In 2006, when I started writing up press releases from BlackRock, I had no idea I’d one day ideate and host a conference on tokenised assets, design campaigns for trillion-dollar money managers or explain why I think my schedule for asset deployment works in a certain channel at a certain time.
For me, life is all about learning and moving up the value chain. Join us at FP Live! to start or continue your own journey.
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