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A visit to the online magazine of Canadian robo-adviser Wealthsimple can send a reader on a trajectory far beyond the usual tips and tricks that customers have come to expect from a bank or asset management company. Wealthsimple’s articles are targeted and edgy, with headlines such as “How to work in the gig economy and still save like a corporate lifer” or “How to blow your holiday bonus.” The articles go beyond just advice — interviews with popular personalities such as Anthony Bourdain and Kevin Bacon on personal struggles with money help humanize the personal finance experience.

“We don’t talk to people about oil prices and interest rates, we talk to people about interesting stories about money — we do a series of money diaries where we interview celebrities and interesting people to help break down the taboo of talking about money,” said CEO Mike Katchen.

Wealthsimple joins a league of brands that tell stories without the need to constantly link to a line of products and services. Other finance companies have also opted for organic storytelling, including Charles Schwab, whose magazines focus less on the nitty gritty of finance than the “shared values” that the brand has with its customers’ lifestyles. It’s an approach that’s worked for Wealthsimple, whose content has been cited as a credible source by mainstream media outlets, including stories from Business Insider, Money, CNBC and MarketWatch. The site gets 300,000 page views a month, according to the company.

Wealthsimple’s branded content shop is an in-house operation run by 10 full-time employees and headed by former GQ editorial director Devin Friedman. The team also includes two Wieden+Kennedy alumni, the agency known for its work for Nike. As Tearsheet reported in February, Wealthsimple’s move to bring in design talent is a trend among financial advisory companies seeking to add a human touch to customers’ experience with money. Katchen said the target audience is professionals between 30 and 45.

“It’s about how to create a brand that resonates with a younger audience and speaks to them in terms they understand,” he said. “The classic example is the person who knows investing is something they should be doing, but they don’t have the time or interest in doing it themselves.”

To marketers who develop branded content for banks and finance companies, Wealthsimple may be onto something.

“When you go there [Wealthsimple’s website], there’s a cohesive editorial feel to it, which I think really helps them as they are expanding to a new market,” said Michael Grimes, svp of editorial strategy at Hill Holliday, the lead creative agency for Bank of America. “If you look at their imagery, they could have taken stock photos, but a lot of them are hand-drawn illustrations or treated photos — everything feels like it’s coming from same place editorially, and it has the same visual identity as a magazine.”

Grimes said customers are less likely to shy away from branded content if it’s seen as useful and the information is accurate.

“People want solid, accurate information,” he said. “If brands have the bench and the access to expertise to give that information, that gives them a leg up.”

In the competitive market for millennial investors, content that’s not seen as useful can easily turn off customers, said one analyst.

“We see a saturated market of ‘tips and tricks,’ ‘five things you need to know about,'” said Jeff Baker, director of digital marketing for content marketing agency Brafton. “People want to read in-depth pieces of actual use cases of things that worked and things that didn’t.”

Wealthsimple, founded in 2014, hopes its approach to digital marketing, combined with traditional advertising and Facebook ads, will give it a needed push as it expands to new markets. The company, which is backed by a CA$100 million ($77 million) investment from Power Financial, expanded to the U.S. in February of this year and plans to launch in the U.K. this fall. Despite the challenges of growing the company’s reach in new markets, Katchen said there’s room for more players.

“We’re not building a business to solve the problem for early adopters only — we’re in the business to solve the problem that investing is complicated for the average person,” he said. “We’re trying to create a lifestyle brand around financial services that’s broadly relevant to the masses out there, and that’s informed our strategy and given us confidence that the market is wide open for a player like us.”

Image: Money Diaries series from Wealthsimple’s online magazine, courtesy of Wealthsimple

By Lucinda Southern

Six months since its creation, the FT’s content marketing unit, FT Squared, is giving paid posts a new look.

The FT’s branded content unit has been improving. Since the first paid post it ran in October, the publisher is seeing the time spent on these posts increase by 123 percent (although it wouldn’t disclose what the actual time was). And engagement is rivaling that on its editorial pieces.

FT Squared’s “paid post” format sits in a prime position on the FT homepage. Across the nine brand campaigns run through FT Squared since launch, it has improved click through rate from the home page by 30 percent, according to the publisher. Then they are taken to separate pages that contain client-voiced articles, videos and images, chosen by the brand.

“We’re now creating ambitious content environments that are immersive,” said Alexis Jarman, content activation director at the FT. Previously paid posts were similar in look and feel to FT articles, although labeled as paid. With the latest update these brand pages will be using the full width of the screen, on all devices, and include more multimedia features, like animated graphs and infinite scrolling. Here it borrowed from the success of its editorial special reports, particularly that of “Distinctive Living,” a series looking at expats around the world, adding in more multimedia features like the infinite scroll. “We saw significant increase in active engaged time,” said Jarman.

When FT Squared launched in September 2015 the aim was to offer more tailored advertiser partnerships around branded content, all under one banner. Increasingly, the publisher uses reader insight to inform content and adjust campaigns in real time. And it’s proving successful, in cases engagement paid for posts have matched that of editorial, according to Jarman.

“We’re learning about what the FT readers want and looking at the ways they interact with content,” she said. “Evolution is very much the right word. We’re far more reliant on the data to prove something, rather than going on intuition, and we can use that to be the consultant and advise clients.” This means it spends more time A/B testing on the home page the combination of the headline and the first line of the piece, the combination of text and images, whether posting a question or a statement. “As we run more campaigns, we will start to see more trends here, perhaps related to the sector of the client, or theme,” she said.

BP, a new client for the FT, is the first brand to make use of the new and improved paid posts, launching the campaign Committed to the U.K., currently only two articles have been published, “Changes in the World of Energy,” and “Why Scientists Give Science a Bad Name.” The next will publish in June, there’s currently no end date for the campaign, but in terms of tracking reader engagement, it is still in the exploratory phases.

BP in the FT: The paid post ‘Changes in the World of Energy’

Previously FT Squared found even the smallest changes had positive impacts on a campaign’s performance. For instance, for an S&P Dow Jones campaign last month, the client’s campaign objective was to drive whitepaper downloads. Such a small step as hyperlinking to the downloadable report — rather than featuring a large download button at the end — at resulted in 15 percent of those reading the article go on to download the whitepaper.

For a technology client, NTT Communications, last month the brand first ran a piece with FT Squared around a broad subject matter. Here it found that active engaged time (identified by mouse movements) and scroll depth were performing well. In the second piece the focus was more relevant to the brand, and the click through rate to the brand’s site was higher. “If delivering insight and awareness is the objective then a more broad subject matter works, or if click through rate is important then the piece can be more authentic to the brand,” said Jarman.

Of course, native solutions take time and resources. Currently the FT Squared team itself stands at five people and it’s “efficient,” but it pulls on the expertise of the commercial and data teams for audience insight, and external editorial contributors. Jarman said there are plans to staff up.

FT Squared solutions are outside the FT’s paywall, and the publisher helps advise on distribution through its own platforms, the brand’s sites and on Twitter in order the reach the right audiences. As such, the FT’s rate card is as bespoke as its solutions. As FT Squared grows it will continue to offer more fluid packages around specific customer journeys, and increase targeting around the FT’s audience.

“It’s important to think of native advertising in context,” said Jarman, “it means a lot of different things to different people.”

This post appeared originally on Digiday

Tag: branded content

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