Financial Services & Institutions

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

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 2

Geoff Director, executive vice president of strategy, Manifest

There is not a more interesting place to be a marketer right now than in the wealth management sector — and I don’t just mean within financial services. These firms will need to undergo a metamorphosis from B2B organizations with unknown brands and no marketing muscles into household names in mass-affluent America with new business models. And fast.

It’s an intoxicating strategic puzzle to work on.

There are only so many rich people

The universe of high-net-worth individuals, for whom the entire apparatus of independent wealth management and RIAs has been geared, is, shall we say, expiring. There are too many advisors to serve the dwindling nugget of super-wealthy folks, so advisory businesses have been looking to scale, congealing into larger and larger networks and groupings.

This explains why M&A activity in this sector has been scalding hot. According to MarshBerry, in Q1 of 2025 alone, we saw 88 transactions in this sector — the third-highest quarter in any year, ever.

Now they’re all starting to recognize the marketing transformation staring them in the face. The next generation of wealthy investors, and the inheritors of massive Boomer wealth, do not relate to the current model of financial advice. According to BlackRock, 70% of heirs are likely to leave their family’s advisor after getting their inheritance. They simply don’t relate to the current model of wealth management, having been conditioned for low-fee, passive management.

Suddenly, large wealth management firms are going to need to market themselves directly to mass-affluent America, with new products and new business models. These are consumers who never had the asset levels worthy of most advisors’ time. People who have never been marketed to by this industry. People who have never heard of most of these brands.

Understanding your future demand

The assumption most wealth management companies are making is that any direct-to-consumer offering for younger, mass-market investors should be positioned as tech-centric and self-directed. Kids today — they just love their technology, right?

In reality, today’s youngest investors (Gen Z) are more interested in paying for financial advice than the other generations are, according to Cerulli. Contrary to cliches about young people, they fully grasp the severe economic challenges they’re likely to face, are responsibly trying to get ahead of them, and want some traditional human advice along the way.

Our own search and social listening analysis shows that Millennial and Gen Z consumers are interested in finance and investing as a subject matter. They consume videos on “FinTok” and YouTube, not only for edification, but for…welp…fun.

It’s understandable for wealth management firms to leverage robo technology to preserve margin when serving larger numbers of consumers with fewer assets, but the brands that figure out just the right way to integrate old-fashioned relationship building, high-touch advice, and good service, in the way today’s consumers like to communicate, are going to have a massive advantage. Technology is the table stakes — humanity is the real differentiator.

Build. A. Brand.

Before you run out and give a bunch of money to a creative agency or production company to make a consumer campaign, you need a brand strategy worthy of the consumer stage.

You’re entering a different game than winning a book of business from a breakaway advisor, where you could get away with little more than a coherent website, an email list, and a brochure about how much you revere advisors’ independence. According to Radius Insights, only 3%‑8% of relationships in financial services are “in play” each year because consumers don’t feel there is a meaningfully different alternative.

According to Cerulli, 87% of next-gen wealth holders say “shared values” are important when choosing a financial advisor. They’re not “value investors,” they’re values investors – they want to know what they’re buying into when they sign up with your firm more than they care about the particulars of your products, your service model, or your AUM. These consumers will not look up from their phone for your version of “our advisors take the time to learn about you and your family” or “our robo advisor tool is super easy to use!”

If you don’t codify a differentiated value proposition, a unique brand personality, and an ownable POV to drive all your messaging, it’s likely that your marketing will blend into the void despite best intentions.

Making the case internally

It will likely be challenging to sell your board on brand strategy work, as they tend to see this kind of thing as expensive and frivolous. So it’s imperative that you don’t frame brand building as a cost at all, but rather as an intangible financial asset that accrues value over time, like any other investment.

First, show that having a strong brand identity means having a “durable competitive advantage,” as Warren Buffett likes to say. Your advisors may be the same. Your tech may be the same. But if you have established a reputation in the minds of consumers, and they think there’s something special about you, that is an advantage you can quantify.

Second, as a result of establishing a reputation with consumers, your brand has measurable value as intellectual property. For instance, the Coca-Cola brand alone, independent of its actual business (i.e., sales, revenue, etc.), is worth tens of billions of dollars simply for being famous. If your organization is sold, the value of your brand identity would be a line item on the balance sheet.

Build an audience

You understand the next-gen investor that you’ll have to win with. You built an ownable brand strategy and managed to get your board to buy in. Now what do you do with that fancy new brand of yours?

Traditionally, wealth firms would think in terms of campaigns. Launch a website, run a brand campaign, maybe sponsor an event, then harvest the leads and repeat. But the players who win with consumers in this category will have a markedly different approach – they’ll think like media brands and content companies, with engaged followerships.

If you had a new product to announce or insight to share tomorrow, how many people do you think you could reach? The new marketing metrics of success should be subscriber growth, community size, listeners, and viewers. Because the audience’s default assumption is not that wealth managers are the true experts – content is now currency.

As frustrating as it may be to realize that you’re competing for thought leadership status with content creators working alone in their basements, focus on the bright side: This is a meritocracy. If you can figure out compelling content, you can compete for attention with the biggest names in the sector and business media giants alike.

Think about which executives at your firm could have a bigger presence on social media and become influencers. Remember, young investors don’t want rockstars – they want substance over flash, with a dose of humanity. Harness the most insightful frameworks or talking points that your advisors are coming up with and turn them into unique thought leadership pieces for the masses. Turn what used to be boring newsletters and PDFs into evermore visual, native social content.

Audience building will help you address the vast middle part of your funnel that’s often overlooked in this space, where firms try to go from awareness to handshake in one swift motion. Turn your brand strategy into a content engine that could only come from your firm. Answer the fundamental question of content and you’ll be on your way: what could only your firm create that would also be genuinely interesting to the audience?

We’d love to help

As I mentioned in the introduction to this series on financial services marketing, Manifest thrives in the complexity and haziness of things like content strategy. In fact, we built a content strategy model just for situations like this, where there are so many variables to try to tackle at once. We’d love to show it to you. Or reach out to hear about our approach to brand strategy in the financial services space.

If you’d like to get a copy of our Top 10 List of Marketing Moves for Financial Services, email us 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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