AI & The Future of Financial Marketing

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Hello dear reader and welcome back to Spark!

We at Vivace hope you had a wonderful holiday season and spent some quality time with family and friends.

They say you should start as you mean to go on, so we thought we’d kick off the year with big-picture thinking on AI from a really great event that I attended a few weeks ago—The Gramercy Institute Financial Marketer’s Forum in Chicago, on the theme of 2025: Trends & Directions in Financial Marketing.

I was lucky to be invited to participate in a very topical panel discussion on AI & The Future of Financial Marketing alongside Anthony Nygren, EVP at EMI Strategic Marketing, and Shane Stiles, President of Gate 39 Media, that yielded loads of great insights that I couldn’t wait to share.

One more thing: just this week, a project that we’ve spent the last year working on finally launched to the world. CDP, the operator of the world’s only independent environmental disclosure system, launched its newly evolved brand to the world. We’ll have much more to share on this in the coming weeks—for now, you can check out the work at cdp.net/brand-hub.

-joel

Panel insights: AI & The Future of Financial Marketing

How prolific is artificial intelligence today in financial services marketing and advertising?

AI is already ubiquitous within marketing and advertising—it’s been in the background, running a lot of the services that we've been using for some time, but increasingly we will see it rolled out as front-facing tools within products that you already use everyday, which will dramatically speed up adoption.

The AI within these user experiences will become more integrated and human-process driven e.g. rather than just an open text box stream of responses that need to be manually edited afterwards, you will be guided to refine and edit content as you go.

How is AI going to help us produce better marketing this year?

It’s going to enable us to produce better content and experiences, faster and more efficiently. For example creating audio files or podcasts out of written content and automatically hosting them alongside on your web platform.

Then there are background activities like measuring and using data more effectively—such as better measurement of the type and level of activity of marketing prospects and more accurate scoring, which in turn enables better personalization for the user and helps you move them through the funnel more efficiently.

How can marketing functions maximize their use of AI?

Define effectiveness

The capabilities of AI will continue to expand but it won’t solve all your problems for you, or you will only end up using a fraction of its true potential, without considered application—it needs to be relevant to what you are trying to accomplish to be effective.

Empower, incentivize and measure AI use in your teams

Learn from leading organizations who are allowing or empowering their teams to play and to build with AI tools e.g. Broadridge has an organizational goal that every single person at the firm has to be using AI to do their job. This might be with internal or external tools, or a combination of both. But a degree of freedom and flexibility around use and use cases will be key to maximizing potential here.

Another example of this is inspired by Gino Wickman’s EOS (Entrepreneur Operating System) framework: designating “How are you using AI in your work” as a ‘rock’, or measurable priority, for every individual, measuring this quarterly and contributing to annual performance reviews. This can then roll-up to provide an overall picture of AI use across teams or departments as a whole.

How will AI use and adoption evolve in the next few years?

Sophistication and adoption will remain fragmented

It will likely be similar to social media, the advent of which was 20 years ago—and yet even now it is still evolving and there is huge disparity in its use and efficacy. There are still lots of people and companies who use it really badly, and some using it really effectively.

Not everyone will see a net gain in effort vs reward

Your data has to be refined to a very good, usable state and you need to build out the infrastructure. At the end of the day, your performance may be better, but you might only know in retrospect if it was worth the effort to get to that point.

Businesses have lots of places they could be investing, and they will need to assess if AI tools are where their investment is best placed, because you will likely need to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, in creating an infrastructure that enables you to make an impact.

AI-enhanced data will become a new cost

AI is flattening access and costs are dropping, or being incrementally priced into existing tools, but one area where we will see a new cost is with AI-enhanced data. We’re increasingly seeing AI insights or data enhancement providers being incorporated into CRMs, for example when purchasing customer profiles.

Right now with a HubSpot subscription you can get any IP visitor or any contact, not even the full contact name, and then pay 30 cents to get a third party AI data enhancement pulled and tracked right into the system, and even ranked for what their intent is.

Building a culture of AI will win in the longterm

Leveraging your culture is critically important within this industry—the real assets ride up and down the elevators, as they say. AI can help, but it's not going to replace culture, and this is based on research from C-suite executives across the financial services spectrum.

Microsoft, Apple, and Meta, or the companies that you work for, will take care of the technology, but for the majority of us focusing on culture within the brands we work with and for will be how we win. Meaning, building a culture of: ‘how do we use AI? When do we use AI? What should we do and not do with AI?’, and embedding that into the fabric of your culture.

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Thanks for joining us this week. Anything we missed? Something we should include next week? Send us your shout-outs and strong opinions to include in next week’s edition at [email protected]. 

Spark is a production of Vivace, a global B2B creative studio and consultancy that helps businesses drive meaningful brand and commercial impact. Get in touch if you’d like to chat with any of the team. Have a great week ahead.