Reprogramming Financial Services Marketing

Launched in 1979, Entertainment Sports Programming Network, or ESPN, is today’s quintessential media empire. Boasting more than 50 business entities, the sports content giant is in every conceivable channel—television, radio, print, online, wireless—while extending its reach via consumer products, event management and corporate outreach. Another cable success story is Discovery Communications, owner of 13 cable channels in the U.S. and reaching 180 countries with programming that includes Discovery and Animal Planet. As reported by the New York Times, the company’s chief executive, David Zaslav, wants to “transform Discovery from a great platform company into a great content company.”¹

In the same story, the Times asserts that today, “every media company seems to wish it were a cable TV company….”² Which raises this provocative idea: Is the media/cable content marketing model one for financial firms to follow?

Certainly, financial firms know about the power of cable, courtesy of outlets like Bloomberg and CNBC. Going multi-channel is not a foreign concept, either, at least at the service level: Personally interacting with customers by phone, e-mail, mobile marketing and social media channels around the clock is a financial industry loyalty and satisfaction baseline. And if the new mantra in content marketing is “think like a publisher,” then “thinking like 
a media or cable operator” intuitively seems a 
not-too-distant cousin.

In fact, there is evidence that financial marketers are starting to “channel” their media counterparts. While it may be adventurous to imagine that we might see something like the Goldman Sachs Financial Programming Network, with its own version of SportsCenter, round-the-clock financial programming and dining at the GSFPN Zone, financial firms are figuring out how to deliver customized, branded content in ways that go beyond traditional promotion and customer service to attract, engage and sustain audience and market share.