Hell’s bells

Some of your marketing assets should be physical, tactile, sonorous, and have provenance.

AI-generated summary

What’s new: The London Stock Exchange has revived the daily bell ringing to open trading, unveiling a bronze bell on Tuesday to mark 40 years since the 1986 Big Bang deregulation.
Why it matters: A physical object with sound, weight and history can create recall and affection that digital content and AI cannot, which matters when optimism and human connection are what a brand really sells.
What to do about it: Sit down with your head of marketing this week to find moments, gifts and handwritten notes that give clients something tangible, memorable and worth keeping or looking forward to.

Read on to learn why:

① People increasingly gravitate to more human experiences.

② The most effective, emotive marketing is often physical or experiential.

③ If your business model carries risk, your brand should own it.

④ Blockchain doesn’t mean Bitcoin.

⑤ Measuring marketing-qualified leads isn’t the killer KPI you think it is.

⑥ Low staff turnover isn’t a vote of confidence.

⑦ Marketing has to be focused on the bottom line.

📸 But first, a flashback. Last month I told you that your marketing should embrace the AI agents that will be between you and your clients. Well, this week Global Finance explains why major banks are reining in agentic AI but suggests that their decision to halt agentic access to client accounts is a temporary, effective response until agent management catches up with the technology.

What's new

A bell opened trading at the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday, reports The Times.

The LSE has revived the tradition of ringing a bell to open trading every day, a custom it abandoned with Big Bang 40 years ago. It unveiled a new bronze bell on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of the 1986 deregulation, which scrapped fixed commissions, opened the market to foreign ownership and replaced open-outcry trading with electronic markets. Michael Findlay, the LSE’s chairman, rang it at the market open to applause from guests in the exchange’s lobby.

Those guests included Lucy Rigby, the City minister; Andrew Griffith, the shadow chancellor; Dame Susan Langley, the Lady Mayor; and chief executives including Allison Kirkby of BT and Ian Brown of Trainline. Rigby said that, despite being a day away from a fiscal event, she was never going to miss the celebration. Dame Julia Hoggett, the LSE’s chief executive, said the aim wasn’t to recreate 1986 but to symbolise “community, connection” and a shared spirit of entrepreneurship and optimism.

Findlay donated the bell himself. It was one of the last cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, where Big Ben was made, before the foundry closed in 2017 after more than 450 years. As the guests celebrated, the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral rang out in reply.

Why it matters

I love the theatre of this. The UK needs to be more like the US when it comes to investing. Our retail and institutional investors are too conservative, and we seem to lack the passion for equity markets that you find readily across the pond. A bell won’t change our culture overnight but it’s a step in the right direction — and Hoggett is right: optimism is what an exchange really sells.

① What matters is why a lump of bronze works at all. It does nothing a press release or a market-open video couldn’t, yet it has a sound, a weight and a history. In the digital age, in the age of AI, people increasingly gravitate to more human experiences, things of substance and tactility. And if that comes with provenance too, so much the better. In this case, the first reader comment on The Times’ story reads: “Some great history and memories.”

② I’ve seen this effect first-hand. I’m not sure whether they still do it but when I was at Deutsche Bank, we used to hand out model cars at Sibos, the annual banking ops conference. Each year, a different luxury car. Most people claimed they were ‘taking them home for the kids’, but I know plenty ended up on office shelves. They were beloved and anticipated: every year people came to the stand asking what this year’s model was. AI can now produce unlimited content in seconds, but it can’t produce that kind of recall and affection. The most effective, emotive marketing is often physical or experiential.

What to do about it

Take action

Sit down with your head of marketing this week. Ask them:

Which moment in our client relationship deserves a ritual? Could our onboarding, go-live or first trade become something clients look forward to?
Could our conference giveaway become a series people collect? What would make clients ask what’s coming next year?
When did our top 50 prospects last receive something from us they could hold? Would they keep it on their desk?
Does anything we give away have a story worth telling? Could our next client gift or printed publication come from a maker with a provenance of its own?
When did our chief executive last write to a client by hand? Which 10 clients would value that note most this quarter?

Get help

If you need help growing your business’ recognition, reputation and revenue — or know someone who does — we should talk.

Learn more

Top stories

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

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Blackmail, deception and extinction: The AI risks revealed in Anthropic’s IPO pitch

③ If your business model carries risk, your brand should own it.

Dario Amodei, Chief Executive, Anthropic. Source: City AM, 27 October 2026

Anthropic has filed the prospectus for its IPO next month, devoting 92 pages to risk factors — roughly three times SpaceX’s. Alongside conventional warnings (five clients account for a quarter of revenue; compute commitments exceed $800bn), it cautions that its AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” and that future models might resist shutdown or produce outputs resembling blackmail. PitchBook has cut its valuation to $1.42trn, well below the $2trn some backers had hoped for.

Most financial services firms treat risk disclosures as a necessary evil: legal boilerplate, written by lawyers and kept well away from marketing. Anthropic has turned such warnings into an extension of its brand. A lab founded by people who left OpenAI over safety fears loves nothing more than warning loudly about safety fears. It also names the obvious objection up front, admitting its spending “may seem irresponsibly large at first glance”.

Candour hasn’t spared Anthropic a valuation haircut, but it has reinforced its brand story. If your business model carries inherent risks, name them before your critics do, in your own words and with the evidence that you’re managing them.

FINTECH

$6.3bn in 30 minutes: how the world’s biggest heist unfolded

④ Blockchain doesn’t mean Bitcoin.

Source: The Financial Times, 30 October 2026

Hackers, likely North Korean state-backed, stole $6.3bn from Binance in about 30 minutes on Thursday evening, the largest financial theft in history. Binance’s initial investigation suggests they got in through a software engineer’s laptop. Tether, Circle and others froze $2.8bn within hours, but the hackers still got away with $3.3bn. Richard Teng, Binance’s co-chief executive, says the firm is rebuilding and retesting its entire infrastructure.

I’ve long thought crypto is a Ponzi scheme, embraced by criminals and sustained by deluded ideologues. All three were on display here: a rogue state now funds itself by robbing exchanges, and the purists’ cherished principle that no authority should control your assets is exactly what lets the thieves launder their haul at will; the only money saved was in tokens someone in charge could freeze. The bigger cost falls on everyone using the same technology for legitimate ends. Blockchain doesn’t mean Bitcoin. When I was CMO at Quant, the challenge was persuading financial institutions that tokenisation and programmable money had nothing in common with crypto speculation. Stories like this make that job harder for those in the industry trying to deliver legitimate business benefits.

If your firm works with tokenisation, stablecoins or distributed ledgers, don’t let crypto set the terms of your reputation. Strip the crypto vocabulary from your marketing and describe what the technology does for clients: faster settlement, fewer reconciliations, payments that execute only when agreed conditions are met.

MEDIA & MARKETING

Seven B2B marketing shifts that will define 2027

⑤ Measuring marketing-qualified leads isn’t the killer KPI you think it is.

B2B marketing’s traditional playbook is losing relevance, argues Andrea Cruz, Vice President of Media Strategy at Monks. With buyers completing 61% of their research before engaging a vendor, according to 6sense, she wants marketers to scrap the marketing qualified lead and last-click attribution, ungate their expertise, fund audiences rather than products, and report three things to the board: how often AI answer engines cite them, pipeline velocity and revenue.

Little of this is new — in April I told you that, in B2B, prospects don’t move through a pipeline, they experience a mess of moments — but it’s a useful reminder. What I particularly like about Cruz’s piece is how she defines the MQL as “a measure of friction”, not intent. In financial services, where buying committees are large and the decision is often made long before anyone fills in a form, the MQL rewards the last touch and ignores everything that won the deal: the research a prospect read, the panel session they sat through, the peer who recommended you, the answer an AI gave them. Firms still reporting MQLs to the board are measuring the wrong thing very precisely, and funding marketing accordingly.

Ask your sales team what the last five clients you won had read, heard or asked an AI about before the first meeting. How much of that does your attribution model see? Then ask Claude and Perplexity who they would recommend in your category. Does your firm appear in the answer, and do you know which sources put your competitors there?

WILDCARD

Ignore AI and ask for that pay rise

⑥ Low staff turnover isn't a vote of confidence.

Fear of AI may be holding down American pay more than AI itself, argues The Economist. Evidence of AI-driven layoffs is thin, yet Americans are quitting 13% less often than job openings and unemployment would predict, and in professional and business services the quit rate is nearly a third below its 2019 level. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimate that gloomier expectations explain about half the fall in job-hopping since 2022. A Federal Reserve Bank of Boston survey found that just one worker in ten fears losing their own job to AI, while six in ten expect AI-driven layoffs in their industry. Workers who felt AI had made them more productive were more than four times as likely to be willing to ask for a pay rise.

What interests me is the gap between how people see their own job and everyone else’s: most feel safe themselves yet expect layoffs all around them, which suggests the fear comes from the story they’re being told, not from anything they’ve seen. That makes it a communications problem, and it's playing out inside your firm. Where leaders say nothing clear about AI, Reddit fills the silence. The side effects, lower attrition and muted pay pressure, look like good news on a dashboard. They aren't. People who stay because they're afraid to leave aren't committed; they're waiting.

So don’t read low staff turnover as a vote of confidence. Employees who are comfortable with AI may well ask for more money; better that than they’re first out of the door when the fear lifts. Meanwhile, train those who still need it. Remember the old adage: “What if we train our people and they leave? What if we don’t and they stay?”

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Thomas Barta on why CMOs make good CEOs:

Thomas Barta. Source: LinkedIn, 29 October 2026

“Many marketers lament that they don’t control all the profit levers. Well, finance chiefs don’t own profit either. Yet they roam the organisation asking every function to improve it. CMOs should be just as nosy, following the money beyond marketing, even where the organisation chart says ‘not yours’.”

Don’t settle for marketing.

Aspire to InMarketing.

Wishing you an informed week,

P.S. How was your Halloween? It’s gotten a bit out of hand in my neighbourhood.