Financial Services & Institutions

Finance built empires without marketing. The next chapter won’t be that generous.

Didi Gluck, vp, editorial director, Manifest

There’s a persistent belief in marketing that the idea is the hard part, and that everything after it is just execution. Get the concept right and the rest will follow. But as a content and digital agency that’s worked with hundreds of clients, we’ve seen time and again that the top causes of delays and inflated budgets generally have nothing to do with the creative. They’re about things like the approval chain, misalignment, and asset management. Operational failures … every one of them.

According to a recent survey that ran in AdWeek, 98% of campaigns launch late and 70% exceed their production budgets. Yet most marketing organizations invest enormous energy developing their creative capabilities and almost none developing their operational ones. If this sounds like your organization, it’s likely costing you more than you realize.

The new competitive advantage in marketing isn’t just a distinct creative campaign. It needs to be paired with the operational infrastructure that gives a great idea a fighting chance.

Here’s what that looks like in practice, from Manifest’s project managers who thrive in the operational trenches every day.

Alignment is an ongoing discipline

Misalignment rarely happens at kickoff. It usually happens three weeks later, when someone makes a small call without realizing it changes something else and by then, the damage can be hard to undo.

“Most project failures are caused by misalignment, which compounds over time,” says Marissa Thompson, an account operations director at Manifest. A subject-matter expert brought in for one narrow decision, for instance, unintentionally steering the whole workstream off course weeks later.

The key is to confirm direction at every major inflection point, not just the beginning, asking whether the work still matches the brief, whether priorities have shifted, and whether anyone has an unvoiced concern. This process is baked into how we operate with every client.

Go back to your brief

Contrary to popular opinion, a brief doesn’t always have to be a formal document, it can live in a kickoff call, a project plan, or sometimes, a strategic, shared slide deck. “The format of the brief can be flexible,” Thompson says. “But the objective shouldn’t be.”

What must always be concrete is a mutually agreed-upon path forward. At Manifest, great work starts with a clear picture: what we’re making, why it matters, who we’re talking to, how we’ll know it worked, and the time and resources we’ll have to get there. Without these non-negotiables, even small deviations can send a project off course in ways that aren’t obvious until real harm has been done.

Create conditions for good work

Related to having a clear objective is having a well-defined way of working so you can bring your deliverables to life. Every marketer has been on a project where the work was good but the execution was chaotic. Things got lost. People didn’t know what they were supposed to do or when. That’s not the path to success. Getting the who, when, and where established at the start of every project creates the conditions for your team to do good work, says Emma Hecht, a project manager at Manifest. That means establishing who’s doing the work, how long they need, and where the resources live, so the team can stop guessing and start producing.

Edit your approval chain

Mapping the approval chain early provides protection from people chiming in at the wrong moments and causing unnecessary revision cycles, says Abisola Alade, a project manager at Manifest. And once a stakeholder has made a decision, it should be written down in a place everyone can find it. Nick Prayner, a project manager at Manifest, calls this decision logging. In a long project, that record is the difference between moving forward confidently and spending a meeting relitigating something that was settled three weeks ago.

Define done

“‘Done’ can be an expensive word if everyone on a project is picturing a different finish line,” says Eric Kanerva, a senior project manager at Manifest. That finish line needs to be the same for everyone on the project. Does done mean the assets are delivered? That the campaign is live? That the results are in? Defining done for each deliverable at the start of a project, not the end, eliminates a category of disagreement that reliably surfaces at the worst possible moment, when everyone’s tired and ready to move on.

Take temperature checks

Marketing is a high-pressure, deadline-driven, subjective business. When people don’t feel safe raising problems, they don’t raise them and errors that can cost time and money can happen. Regular live check-ins, along with the occasional unscheduled Slack message, turn potential crises into small talk—so they don’t end up needing crisis control.

Part 1

Geoff Director, executive vice president of strategy, Manifest

The financial services clients I have worked with — the individuals themselves — have been some of the most capable, competent, and passionate marketers I’ve met. Whether in wealth management, commercial banking, fintech, or beyond, I have found these clients to be dynamic in a way their organizations are not. At least, not about marketing.

These clients fight the good fight for organizations that are intrinsically skeptical of marketing, because they weren’t built by it, and haven’t needed it to be particularly robust in order to achieve incredible heights.

That’s about to change. Many of these organizations are about to realize they need brand building, advanced content capabilities, strategic marketing discipline, and good old-fashioned advertising to keep the good times rolling. When growth gets harder to find, the board starts wanting to believe in marketing, and the marketing leaders in this industry may find themselves, at long last, with a real opportunity to do some damage. Let’s make the most of it.

Finance’s era of complexity emerges

According to the Institute for Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances, the financial sector saw the third-highest deal volume and the highest deal value of any sector since 1985. And it’s crescendoing now with deal values up 25% YOY in 2025 according to PwC.

These organizations are trying to M&A their way to new growth, the path to which has become muddled by a bewildering set of regulatory, technological, and cultural changes that shake the very foundation of how they historically make money. It’s causing a massive convergence of business models, as all these funky corporate crossbreeds now descend from the hills to compete for the greatest share of the nation’s diversified financial needs. Wealth managers that are also fintechs. Fintechs that are also banks. Banks that are also brokerages. And so on.

These organizations now find themselves in a bloody free-for-all, most without the protective armor of a differentiated brand to fall back on, having never invested in building one, nor the weaponry of creative marketing muscles or advanced marketing systems in place to outperform the competition.

And where does that leave the marketers inside these organizations? For one thing, in need of better partners who understand any of this.

One kind of agency

Most traditional agencies are not well suited to thrive in the complexity of financial services, nor are they interested. The regulatory concerns, sophisticated products, often nano-sized audiences, and circuitous decision journeys don’t seem like the makings for gratifying creative work. Most agency people tend to be more interested in culture-forward consumer products.

It takes a certain kind of marketing masochist to get your kicks from navigating the arduous mid-funnel intricacies of RIA demand gen, or finding a dynamic way to talk about annuities, or making a message map for explaining embedded finance. And our people are that certain type.

We’re passionate about this space because we love the challenge of it. We like the high stakes. And it’s just frankly fascinating to be a part of as these organizations move to the forefront of our culture. To prove our passion, we’re creating this content series to share our best thinking about the “underpriced” marketing opportunity in three different sectors within financial services, all of which face fascinating new challenges.

In Part 1, we’ll focus on wealth management. Why they’re all vying for the same new consumers and how to be more than a commodity offering to advisers. In Part 2, we’ll move to fintechs. How they can use brand building to play on the big stage, not be a novelty act. And in Part 3, we’ll talk about commercial banks and how they can restore their place in the system and culture with smart, strategic marketing.

Put us through our paces or reach out for our Top 10 Marketing Moves for Financial Services at hello@manifest.com.

Explore the series

Underpriced: The unexploited marketing opportunity in finance

Part 1

Finance built empires without marketing. The next chapter won't be that generous

Part 2

The next generation of wealth has never heard of you. Time to introduce yourself.

Part 3

10,000 fintechs. One underpriced asset: trust.

Part 4

Banks don't have a relevance problem. They have a relationship problem.

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