Chatterbox

Marketing masquerading as media needs to raise its game.

Read on to learn why:

① From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, every brand is now a media organisation.

② Your prospects are harder to reach, because the noise is deafening.

③ You should lead with the problem you solve, not the institution you are.

④ When selling innovation to a regulated market, your words matter.

⑤ Your physical environment says as much about your brand as any advertising.

⑥ Turning complex into memorable is a communications challenge.

⑦ Quality content is your most valuable marketing asset.

What's new

This week, The Economist’s Schumpeter column gave a name to a corporate trend that has been building for years: the “chatter-industrial complex”.

The opening exhibit is OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who has decided that hiring conventional spin-doctors will not do for a company that must simultaneously convince investors of its future profitability and the rock-throwing public of its humanity. Instead, OpenAI has paid “low hundreds of millions” of dollars to buy TBPN, an 18-month-old video-podcast hosted by two besuited tech bros. Altman’s two favourite journalists are now two of his richest employees.

① Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz says it is building a media business. Stripe runs a publishing house, a print magazine and a show in which one of its founders sinks pints of stout with the great and good of American business. David Sacks co-hosts All In and advises the White House on AI. The phenomenon has spread from Silicon Valley to Wall Street: Norges Bank Investment Management’s Nicolai Tangen hosts one of the better hedge-fund podcasts, Jamie Dimon has talked about going into media after JPMorgan, and the most-discussed piece of financial writing this year — a gloomy take on AI’s economic effects — was a Substack post that Citadel Securities felt compelled to publicly rebut. Even Jane Street, the famously secretive trading firm, has its own podcast.

In the face of all this free ‘content’, actual media companies are raising their game. The Times has cut its daily story output by 25% — from over 200 to about 150 — under a “fewer, better stories” strategy, and reported three consecutive months of record-breaking global audience growth alongside a 29% year-on-year rise in organic search traffic. The Wall Street Journal has rebuilt its video team around the principle of “video journalism that’s worth paying for”, organised into six explicit pillars from original investigations to studio-grade documentary production.

Why it matters

Regular readers have heard me advise marketing teams to think and act like media companies for years. My argument was simple: people have grown immune to advertising, so brands have to earn attention with content that informs, inspires or entertains. That argument has now been comprehensively won. Every fintech has a podcast. Every bank has a newsroom. Every chief executive has a ghost-written Substack. 11:FS, ostensibly a fintech consultancy, is better known for Fintech Insider and the events business that has grown up around it. And now, apparently, some founders buy themselves a talk show outright. With audiences buried under free, plausible-looking material, the professionals who do this for a living are responding the only way they sensibly can — cutting volume and raising quality to a level most marketing departments will struggle to match.

This kind of reputational risk is not to be underestimated.

Schumpeter ends with an observation that should give every leader in financial services pause. If the point of bosses becoming talking heads was to persuade the public they are in good hands, the opposite has sometimes happened. Peter Thiel’s musings about the coming “antichrist” and Marc Andreessen’s enthusiasm for “retardmaxxing” would have stayed in obscure corners if their authors hadn’t gone on podcasts. In regulated industries, this kind of reputational risk is not to be underestimated.

② For financial services and fintech leaders, that adds up to three pressures at once. Your prospects are harder to reach, because the noise is deafening. The bar for “quality content” has just been raised by people whose entire business depends on clearing it. And, as we discussed last week, the most important audience for your content increasingly isn’t a human at all — it’s the AI assistants now mediating your prospects’ research, and they only cite sources they judge to be credible.

What to do about it

Take action

Pick a lane and own it. The Times didn’t grow its audience by publishing more stories about everything. It grew by deciding what only it could uniquely offer, then ruthlessly cutting the rest. Decide what you — and only you — have the authority to say about your corner of financial services. Say it better than anyone else.
Cut your output before you raise your quality. Audit your last quarter the way Anna Sbuttoni’s team did at the Times: how much of what you produced was actually read? At The Times, a quarter of stories were reaching fewer than 2,000 people. Stop publishing the equivalents and reinvest the time in fewer, deeper pieces.
Apply media-grade editorial standards. The WSJ’s hiring test for its expanded video team was “are you a good reporter?”, not “can you produce slick videos?”. Bring the same discipline to your own operation. Original reporting, named experts, evidence, point of view.
Put your experts on the record — carefully. The chatter-industrial complex works because audiences trust people more than institutions. Use that. Get your subject-matter experts speaking publicly, in their own words, on subjects they genuinely know. But heed Schumpeter’s warning: an unguarded podcast appearance has ended more reputations than it has built. Brief, prepare, and pick the venue carefully.
Optimise for the AI reader as well as the human one. The good news, as I argued last week, is that the qualities that make content worth a human’s attention — originality, clarity, evidence, structure, authority — are the same qualities that make AI assistants cite it. Do the work once. Benefit twice.

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Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time this week.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

UK’s best bank revealed – and it’s not a bank

③ You should lead with the problem you solve, not the institution you are.

🗞️ The UK’s best bank isn’t a bank. A Forbes/Statista survey of 54,000 people across 34 countries has ranked Nationwide Building Society — a mutual, not a bank — as the UK’s top financial institution. First Direct came second, Monzo third. Not one of the traditional big four made the top ten. Barclays, their highest-ranking representative, scraped in at 12th.

💡 Customers weren’t asked to rate banks on their balance sheets, their branch networks, or their 200-year heritage. The five criteria were: trustworthiness, terms and conditions, customer service, digital services, and quality of financial advice. In other words: what do you actually do for me? Nationwide, First Direct, and Monzo have built their entire identities around answering that question clearly and consistently. The big four, by contrast, have spent decades marketing what they are — global institutions, pillars of the economy, a branch on every high street, systemically important. But clients don’t care what you are or why (sorry, Simon Sinek) you are. They care about how you can help them. The rankings confirm it: institutional self-description doesn’t make the top ten.

✅ Audit every piece of customer-facing communication your business produces and ask one question: does this tell the client what we are, or does it tell them what we do for them? Strip out the institutional self-description. Replace it with customer benefit. It’s a small editorial discipline with a large commercial consequence.

TECHNOLOGY

Why banks like tokenised deposits

④ When selling innovation to a regulated market, your words matter.

🗞️ Tokenised deposits are quietly outpacing stablecoins inside the largest US banks. 19 of the top 50 are developing a tokenised deposit strategy versus 15 for stablecoins, with four already live in production. JPMorgan’s Kinexys, BMO (with CME and Google Cloud), Vast Bank and the UK’s Monument are among those building networks, while startup Cari claims “low hundreds” of banks in its pipeline. The pitch is simple: same regulatory treatment as a normal deposit, same balance sheet, same protections — just on a blockchain.

💡 The marketing lesson here has nothing to do with blockchain and everything to do with category positioning. Banks aren’t warming to the tech powering tokenised deposits but the business case behind them. They’re a modern way to do a traditional business the banks understand. Whereas stablecoins arrived loudly, with crypto’s baggage attached. Tokenised deposits are wrapped in the language banks already trust — “direct obligations,” “prudential oversight,” “redeemable at par.” Same tech, different narrative.

✅ If you’re marketing anything novel into financial services, audit your vocabulary. Strip out the words that trigger defensiveness — “crypto,” “disruption,” “parallel” — and replace them with the language your buyers know. Position the new thing as a continuation of something familiar, not a break from it. The goal isn’t to dilute the innovation; it’s to remove the friction between your buyer and their internal stakeholders.

MEDIA & MARKETING

JPMorgan to build Canary Wharf’s tallest tower after City airport approval

⑤ Your physical environment says as much about your brand as any advertising.

Source: The Financial Times, 7 April 2026

🗞️ JPMorgan Chase has secured approval from London City Airport to build a 265-metre tower on its Riverside South site in Canary Wharf — one of the tallest office buildings in Europe. The £3 billion project consolidates the bank’s three London offices into a single landmark headquarters.

💡 Marketing textbooks often extend the classic 4 Ps to 7. The seventh — Physical Evidence — refers to the tangible signals an organisation uses to communicate quality, credibility, and status. JPMorgan has just taken that principle to its logical, literal conclusion. A 265-metre tower is a brand statement visible on final approach into City Airport. If your brand needs no introduction, you build the tallest building in the neighbourhood and let it do the talking.

✅ Most of us can’t build skyscrapers. But the principle holds at any scale: your physical environment — office, reception, website, even your email signature — communicates something about who you are before a single word is spoken. Make sure it’s saying the right thing.

WILDCARD

What the best private equity-backed CEOs do differently

⑥ Turning complex into memorable is a communications challenge.

Source: Harvard Business Review, 9 April 2026

🗞️ A two-year study of CEOs at private equity-backed companies that consistently deliver outsized returns found that they excel by mastering five behaviors: 1) They create strategic clarity; 2) They align talent to growth ambitions; 3) They maintain relentless focus; 4) They enforce disciplined execution through operating rhythms; and 5) They build cultures that balance trust with accountability. The study shows that top performers embed these behaviours into their systems and routines to scale beyond their personal involvement. The one they led with is striking: these CEOs translate the investment thesis into a three-to-five-year plan, simplify it into “digestible messages”, and repeat it relentlessly across every forum until, as one CEO put it, “everybody from the leadership team to the receptionist understands where they fit within the plan”.

💡 Strategic clarity is often a messaging problem: turning a complex commercial proposition into something a receptionist can repeat. That is precisely the work senior marketers do every day for external audiences, and the best PE-backed CEOs have worked out it needs doing internally too. The implication for fintech and financial services leadership teams is uncomfortable — if your own people can’t articulate the value creation plan in a single sentence, no amount of board decks will fix it, and your CMO is probably better equipped to solve it than your strategy consultant.

✅ Treat your value creation plan as a campaign. Give your CMO a seat at the table when the three-year plan is being written, not when it’s being announced. Insist on a one-page version that uses the same words every time, in every forum, from the all-hands to the investor update to the job description. And measure it the way you’d measure any campaign: can the people you need to act on it actually repeat it back to you? If not, you don’t have a strategy problem. You have a communications problem.

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Alice de Courcy on scrapping gated content:

Alice de Courcy. Source: LinkedIn, 11 April 2026

“Start with a content quality-first approach and build from there.”

Don’t settle for marketing.

Aspire to InMarketing.

Wishing you an innovative week,