We are excited to announce that Rachel Tuffney has been named EVP of U.S. operations at Dianomi and charged with leading Dianomi’s North American business growth.
Rachel has spent most of her career in the financial services industry on both the client side (Citi) and the media side. She joins us from Dow Jones (WSJ), where she spent nearly ten years leading teams responsible for the key advertisers such as Morgan Stanley, Citi and State Street Global Advisors. Most recently, she was head of finance vertical sales and accountable for the largest business unit (revenue) across the business.
The U.S. region poses a significant growth opportunity for Dianomi and Rachel will be instrumental in defining both our future product and customer opportunities in that market. Marketers are moving away from third-party cookies and towards brand-safe targeting. We believe that contextual relevance, combined with highly engaged audiences, is a powerful proposition for marketers and where the industry is heading.
Digital marketing is now well into its adolescence, having disrupted traditional media, advertising and publisher models, but its next stage of evolution will surely be advertisers and clients becoming ever more sensitive to context and real value of what they say and do online. Governance I predict will become increasingly significant for platforms, especially in the highly regulated industries in financial services. As anyone who has watched the alarming film “The Great Hack”, there’s ever growing concerns about privacy and “fake news” that is increasingly top of mind.
Our business at Dianomi now works with over 350 business and financial publishers around the world. They rely on us to be served reliable and fair advertisers and we in turn rely on them that the content is placed respectfully and in the right locations on their sites. As such any placed content or advertisements we operate for clients only ever appear in positions that are contextually relevant and that the message sources are quickly identifiable. The future success of placed content is becoming increasingly complex, as the boundaries blur from what was once advertising, to advertorial to news. I believe strong publisher brands have a vital role to play in safeguarding quality and integrity of reporting, narratives and advertising.
Since we founded Dianomi in 2003, we’ve watched some digital developments with growing anxiety. Piers and I have sat on panels worried about “programmatic advertising”, where advertisements are served to people’s own websites, irrespective of where they may be searching and visiting on the internet. Some of this feels innately discourteous, like stalking and although cost metrics might show such ads reach their audience, it is hard not to think that brands risk reputations by ads and messages appearing in the wrong locations. Running investment ads when I am searching say for a recipe on a food site feels just wrong and out of place. And increasingly, the idea of your computer watching your own moves and behaviours disturbingly can feel lacking users consent or permission.
In order to safeguard brands, firms increasingly need to ensure their content is clearly flagged as to the type of communication it is that is being served. Likewise, the objectives of marketing activity operate best when clear; ads can be superb traffic builders to client websites, insightful copy on its own can lift a brand’s credibility. Expecting both results from one activity might confuse the objectives of each.
I think Piers Currie of Warhorse Partners is right that metrics of digital against marketing success still has some catching up to do. The misattributed quote of Albert Einstein: “The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation” is surely still so true. As we evolve into the next generation of users, understanding the right measures of how we balance both brilliantly will be the recurring challenge.
At Dianomi, we spend a great deal of time analyzing campaign performance data to understand why certain ads perform better. One of the reasons is targeting and the other is creative. Once you have a thorough understanding of who you are targeting, you should optimize your creative for the best performance. (Want more insights? Download our Mastering Native Advertising in Financial Services Report here.)
We evaluate creative variations and make real-time optimizations with placements, so that the advertiser achieves the best performance. Our data shows that the better the headline, the better a native ad performs. The best performing headline that we’ve seen performed at 650 percent more than the average. In native advertising, certainly the headline is the best chance for a quick win to drive more sales. Here are five surefire tips to master your headline creative in your next native ad:
Write for the time poor reader: According to data from Microsoft, people lose concentration after eight seconds. This is why the best headlines are 70 characters or fewer and get straight to the point.
Use High Performance Words: There are 49 words that best perform in headlines. Some of them are:
Numbers and years: 5, 7, 9, 10, 20XX: The No. 1….
Questions: What, Why, When, Which, Will, etc.
Adjectives: Top, Exclusive, Essential and Critical
Benefit: Ways, Rules, Tips, Facts, Lessons, Reasons and Secrets
Qualify the Audience: Words like Trader, Investor Financial Advisor, Retiree
A/B Test: There is no reason why you cannot and should not test your native ad content. In one situation, we tested two headlines where one headline generated a 48 percent higher click-through rate than the other.
Get into your customer’s head: The key to any marketing is knowing what is important to your customers. A/B testing will only tell you how one ad performs against another. Spending time with your sales team, and understanding what’s important to your customers, should be key to informing any content strategy.
As marketing in financial services moves away from big campaigns and blanket messages, innovation is becoming crucial.
“I’m a big believer that innovation is important in every aspect of everything you do professionally, but particularly in marketing when you think how fast paced the world has become. If you are not moving beyond the status quo, you are going to become irrelevant very quickly,” says Janette Jovic, head of digital and content at PGIM Marketing, adding that her team is now moving towards more agile, test-and-learn, marketing initiatives.
Innovation comes in many different shapes and forms. One aspect of innovation that PGIM has already fully embraced is analytics, and not just as it relates to digital channels.
“We hired a marketing analytics manager that sits within our team,” Jovic says. “I worked with him to develop an executive dashboard that gives us a sense of how everything is performing across all of our marketing efforts, including offline, things like conference engagements, PR. That really helps us to understand what’s working and what isn’t.”
Another way to innovate is to focus on personalization, which she sees as the future of marketing in financial services. Offering tailored content to clients is one piece of the puzzle, but “it’s really about offering them something that allows you to connect on a one-on-one level,” according to Jovic.
“It’s only going to resonate with them if it truly helps them do their job or make better decisions at the end of the day. That is something that, until we can do it in a very thoughtful way that’s true to our brand, we’re not even going attempt it. But we’re thinking about it.”
Jovic explains that as people consume information in different ways, in both their personal and professional lives across industries, they’ve come to expect a certain standard, and PGIM has realized that it has to be there to meet clients where they are.
In a world where everybody can build a global brand through technology and social media, but where brands can also easily be destroyed, protecting a brand’s integrity has become more important than ever.
“You’ve always had to protect your brand,” said Wendy Marcone, senior vice president for global marketing at Bank of America. “I don’t know of a time when that wasn’t true. There’s just a lot more opportunities for your brand to take a hit.”
She explained that large companies need to have checkpoints in place to ensure marketing messages are well understood by everyone. This is especially true at global companies.
“If something works very well in the US market, it may not work in every other market,” she said. “It might be offensive, or insulting, or something they can’t even pronounce. There’s a lot to think about.”
She added that “reputational risk is a big deal and the path back from that sometimes can be long”.
In Marcone’s world, internal marketing goes hand in hand with managing that reputational risk, since hiring people who represent the brand accurately goes along way in protecting it.
“Internal marketing has almost become more important than anything else in certain ways,” she said. “The bankers are really the stewards of the brand. They’re out there all the time with clients.”
Every bank employee must believe in what Marcone and her team are trying to communicate about the brand and the company’s personality. “If it’s not believable to them, why would a client, or a prospect, ever believe it.”
Measuring the success of content marketing is a hot topic in the industry and can be tricky for brands.
“There’s no silver bullet to measuring the effectiveness of a content marketing effort,” said Andrew Goldman, senior director for B2B content marketing at TIAA. But he added that there are several ways to check short-term performance metrics.
He cited engagement, virality, amplification, all “media terms to think about how well was this content moved around amongst the consumer audience”. Research and surveys also constitute “ways to find out how a small subsegment of your target audience reacts to concepts and ideas”.
In addition, social media platforms that have become publishers such as Facebook and LinkedIn are offering tools that are turning out to be useful for content marketers to measure the efficacy of their campaigns.
For example, Goldman explained that LinkedIn teams up with Nielsen regularly to do ad effectiveness tests. “If you’re running social advertisement on LinkedIn, which is leveraging your content marketing dialogue, your core concepts, you can look at how your audience responds to that vis-a-vis a selection of competitors.”
The perfect recipe for successful content marketing in financial services is still unknown, but there are some key ingredients that are must haves.
“There are so many ingredients that would go into that recipe,” said Andrew Goldman, senior director for B2B content marketing at TIAA. “You need to be a thought leader as a content marketer, you need to publish in a way that people will come and seek out your advice.” He pointed to three specific ingredients at the top his list.
“Number one is a healthy respect for the attention economy in a do-it-yourself culture,” he said. “Number two an absolute commitment to positive disruption. Not showing up the way everyone else does, but when you do show up and gain people’s attention, you’re right. And the third ingredient in that recipe I would say would be absolute solid grounding in relationship marketing principles, building relationships with consumers, understanding that audience.”
For content marketing in financial services in particular, it’s also important to recognize there’s not just one decision maker, but rather a committee of decision makers who need to be convinced over a long sales cycle.
Goldman added that measuring the impact of a content marketing campaign can be challenging. “It’s the hot topic,” he said. “There’s no silver bullet to measuring a content marketing effort but there is a number of ways to look out for what I would call short-term performance metrics.”
He mentioned engagement, virality, amplification, as well as research surveys. “I think there’s also a mix of digital and even non-digital analytics, event subscriptions, desk discussions at an event, that you would use,” he said.
Looking forward, Goldman sees interactive formats and video as the tools of the future in content marketing, with a particular focus on video episodic content, written episodic content, short blogs and articles.
“The large publishing platforms have made video a central experience for consumers, a cultural experience at this point, so I think it’s a natural evolution,” he said. “I’m not sure how fast and furious it’s going to go with B2B. It already is at a pretty interesting tipping point, but I think a lot of people in our industry are asking that ROI question now.”
Amid a rapidly changing landscape where internet users have become more cynical and attention spans are shrinking, content marketing is finding itself into the limelight.
“Building out content that really resonates, that is organic within the platform that it is served on and that adds real value is something many marketers are focused on at this point in time,” said Tammy Cash, head of marketing at Toronto-based Horizons ETF, which manages 90 exchange traded funds and has more than $10 billion in assets under management.
Cash points to the key ingredients to a successful content marketing campaign, which include data, technology and personality. On data, she explains the importance of “understanding it, mining it and using it appropriately for the specific audience segment”, while personality entails “ensuring you can provide a level of education around an asset class or a type of product and doing so in a way that can resonate humor as well and to a broader audience.”
Cash also emphasizes the need to have the right team members to create content marketing campaigns at financial services firms. “I’ve built the marketing team with a publishing concept, which I think is happening more and more in the world of marketing,” she said. “Hiring increasingly from the worlds of journalism has been a real opportunity to get people on board who are used to work in a deadline-driven world, used to think about marketing from an organized, strategic, calendar perspective.”
It entails building core requirements as it relates to publishing and production, including videos, podcasts and infographics. “It’s experts in the world of content production and distribution in every aspect of marketing, from social media, from videos, you name it,” she said.
What does the future of content marketing world look like in Cash’s view?
More shorter-form videos such as 15-second clips that lead into longer content, and a greater emphasis on artificial intelligence and marketing automation. Videos will not only be shorter, they will also be more personalized.
Ultimately, Cash believes that all marketing will be content marketing. “It is all content,” she said. “It’s about serving the right message to the right audience at the right time.”
The Sunday Times has again recognized Dianomi’s hard work in building a native ad platform designed specifically for financial and business marketers. Dianomi is ranked 24th in the 5th Annual Sunday Times WorldFirst SME Export Track 100 list that ranks Britain’s 100 small and medium-sized (SME) companies with the fastest-growing international sales over the last two years. This recognition follows Dianomi’s ranking last year as #82 in the 18th annual “The Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100.”
Dianomi, and other SME companies on the list, will be feted at a September awards dinner at The London Hilton Bankside.
“It’s gratifying to see The Sunday Times recognize our accomplishment, along with the other fast-growing British SME companies,” said Rupert Hodson, CEO of Dianomi. “Our entire team has worked tirelessly to build a native ad platform that satisfies the specific needs of business and financial marketers, and this recognition from The Sunday Times spotlights the demand for our products.”
Over the past year, Dianomi has grown the number of publishers on our platform to over 350 and the company now works with more than 600 advertisers globally.
On May 14, Dianomi was honored by the Gramercy Institute as a “20 Most Valuable Partner” in Financial Marketing. Dianomi was recognized for its partnership with over 600 financial marketers and for its native ad platform, developed specifically for financial marketers.
“As the only native ad platform focused exclusively on business and finance, we have made it our mission to provide these customers with ad products specifically made to help marketers in this space succeed,” said Rupert Hodson, CEO of Dianomi. “We thank Gramercy Institute and its members for continually recognizing the hard work and emphasis on great products and campaign performance.”
Earlier this year, Dianomi was awarded a Gramercy Institute Content Marketing Award, for its work with the Financial Times. Dianomi partnered with the FT to distribute content developed by the FT’s Alpha Grid, outside of FT’s network.
For one campaign, Dianomi drove the highest rate of all platforms in terms of total clicks: 7% of all external clicks from the content came from Dianomi traffic; and 4% of Dianomi traffic clicked through to the advertiser’s site. Due to the success of the campaign, the companies have gone on to work together on several other campaigns for clients including: Zurich, PWC, Google, Dell, Chubb and UBS.
