Clients want to see you go back to your office
Plus: what sells crypto ETFs?
Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson was proper miffed this week.
A decade ago she voiced an AI companion in the film Her, where her flirty, textured voice made it easy to imagine falling in love with a chatbot. Naturally, Sam Altman approached her to voice "Sky", OpenAI's newly released bot. She declined, so Sam Altman did what he does best, and reproduced her voice anyways. Predictably, she sued, and the voice has been pulled.
I thought about all this when I heard of a brand new word, "slop" . A descendent of spam and junk, slop is the name given to never-ending, AI-generated content. Before, we used to assume that anything online, however badly written, was created by a human. An underpaid one, perhaps, but still a person.
Now, though, it's easy to believe tinny, generic content has been written by AI. Even when it was made by a human after all:
The problem has begun to worry...the advertising agencies who pay to place ads next to content. (According to) Farhad Divecha, the managing director of UK-based digital marketing agency AccuraCast, “We have seen instances where people have commented that an advert was AI-generated rubbish when it was not,” he says, adding that it could become a problem for the social media industry if consumers “start to feel they are being served rubbish all the time”. (highlight mine)
In asset management, a lot of the comms material already sounds pretty robotic. Maybe because of this, face-to-face connecting has only become more important to clients, at least according to a new survey by Cogent Syndicated:
They find institutional clients prefer one-on-one interactions over digital methods like email and social media when evaluating asset managers. They also found that, once a personal connection has been established, email is the preferred form of ongoing comms.
So what do clients expect will happen in those personal meetings? What is the magical experience setting it apart? Well, this week Citywire spoke to several gatekeepers about how they try to assess the culture when evaluating asset managers.
Struggling to define "culture", let alone quantify it, the buyers spoke about trying to discern clues through onsite visits. It reads like a theatrical production of a bygone era:
‘Are people smiling as they are walking through the hallways?’ asked Jack Shannon, a senior manager research analyst for equity strategies at Morningstar.
Andy Read, Senior VP of AMS research at Raymond James, said his team makes similar observations during onsite visits -- for example, if employees’ doors are open or closed.
‘Are they talking to each other? What happens when a portfolio manager runs into an analyst in the hall? Do they kind of have a warm greeting?’ Read said.
The mythical office, with all these bustling halls, no longer exists. Also this week, the very same Citywire surveyed over 900 investment professionals, on both their vision and reality of office life. It looks nothing like the above.
Basically, the less they're required to be in the office, the happier they are. What employees really hate, it would seem, is the loss of agency. Because the other thing the survey found is that 30% of respondents go into the office more than required, hinting at a potential eagerness to work in-person, so long as it's optional.
Similarly, this week ONS data was crunched to show there's been a 29% decrease in UK business flights last year compared to 2019. Both remote work and an environmental push against corporate air travel are resulting in fewer in-person meetings and more digital interactions, which are inherently less authentic.
We want the sparkle and uniqueness of the human touch. We want to feel like Scarlett Johansson is talking to us for real. But we also want efficiency, and AI sells the dream that we can have it both ways. Except, along the way, we become suspicious that what we're being served with isn't, in fact, sparkly and unique. We think it’s slop.
For every reaction, there's a counter-reaction. Investment management clients are already demanding more of the real, in-person experience. But in person doesn’t scale, and it ain’t cheap. I suspect this will become one of marketing’s biggest problems.
Treasure Corner: Crypto selling points
This week the SEC threw a crypto curveball. On Monday, it asked Nasdaq, CBOE and NYSE to fine-tune their applications to list spot Ether exchange-traded-funds (ETFs), and gave them a deadline to do this by end of Tuesday. This quick turnaround is, shall we say, a-typical of regulatory timelines. Before this happened, watchers were sure the SEC would reject these applications.
So we already have Bitcoin ETFs, and now it looks like Ether ETFs are on their way too. Now the question is, can the world of marketing boring mutual funds learn new tricks from the world of marketing crypto.
More specifically, we talked about how much storytelling helps sell thematic ETFs. Should crypto ETFs be sold in the same way? If so, what is the story? And if not, how should they be sold?
Since crypto ETFs are so very new, we can't answer this question directly, but we can get some hints. For example, a recent study titled Behavioral Tokenomics: Consumer Perceptions of Cryptocurrency Token Design (by Robert Mislavsky of John Hopkins University) asked which token features are important to their buyers.
Tokens can vary on attributes. These include staking yields (basically interest rate paid on holding the token), yield type (is it paid in the same token or a different one), yield source, token inflation, and lockup periods. Also, they vary on how their price moves.
The last one, the study finds, trumps everything:
"People prefer tokens that have recently gone up in price over all else."
Incidentally, this was true even for two equivalent outcomes in price and in yield, which kind of sets you up for arbitrage opportunities of the type Sam Bankman-Fried became known for:
"For example, an increase in a token’s prior year’s return has a more positive impact on consumers’ perceptions than an equivalent increase in its staking yield."
So crypto is laden with made up ideas, yet somehow most investors are less interested in storytelling compared with thematic investing in regular stocks. They just want to see the number go up.
Want AI and automation to be actually useful in day-to-day work? We offer training to marketing teams on how to do more and be more with AI. See for yourself.
Also Happening:
Aviva Investors research reveals surge of funds to meet sustainability demand. Aviva Investors surveyed over 60 asset managers globally and found an 18% rise in climate-focused products launched, alongside double-digit spikes in Paris-aligned and impact-driven offerings. It takes months to launch a product, so hypothetically this could have been delayed response …except respondents also said client demand for sustainable investment products remains strong. Especially vivid in Europe, less so in the UK.
We talked last week about some false promises being sold on what AI can do. But JP Morgan has generally been a source of fun and practical ideas. Most recently, it was the "IndexGPT investing tool":
A user prompts the model to suggest a bunch of keywords and phrases related to a specific theme. Then, these terms are fed to a pre-existing tool made with traditional tech, which scans news articles and earnings reports for companies that feature these terms. This allows to pick out a wider basket of companies linked to specific themes.
IndexGPT's promise is therefore a fuller take on thematic trends. Totally viable! But notice the split in work: the prompt-engineering part is relatively small, and paired with a whole lot of other tech.
So when JPMorgan says it will give prompt-engineering training to all new hires, one way to understand this is, it will help employees make more creative use of other assets and processes the bank already has. Any company can apply this thinking, to its own assets and its own processes.
Another great issue!