Media mania

A client’s data and the relationship you have with them should be handled with kid gloves.

Read on to learn why:

① Tailored advertising, done well, is genuinely useful but it must be earned.

② It’s not a great idea to follow in the footsteps of a clown.

③ Savvy AI use should lead to two better-informed humans talking sooner.

④ To market financial infrastructure, you need to focus on the why, not the how.

⑤ If your company’s name includes the founder’s name, you better have a plan B.

⑥ A distinctive voice should be celebrated and nurtured by your organisation.

⑦ Brexit was the greatest act of economic self-harm in recent history.

What's new

Citi is to sell advertising space to brands using its cardholders’ own spending data, reports Finextra.

Citi Commerce Media lets brands reach the bank’s 70 million American customers across Citi.com, the Citi Mobile app and paid media, built on 6.5 billion annual transactions spanning more than 700 spending categories. Closed-loop measurement lets advertisers trace the sales their campaigns actually produce. Citi says early tests delivered up to five times the return on ad spend for one online retailer. The launch follows Citi’s August agreement to acquire Kard, a commerce media and rewards platform, and Abhinav Anand, Citi’s head of value cards, lending and commerce, says the aim is to help partners “anticipate consumer needs” and “reach the right audience at the right moment.”

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: Citi is following Ronald McDonald’s example. The purveyor of junk food will now be serving up junk marketing too, running third-party ads on drive-thru screens, menu boards and self-order kiosks across 450 American restaurants. Chief marketing officer Morgan Flatley says the ambition is a billion-dollar business. Mastercard launched a comparable commerce media network last October. Card networks, banks and burger chains have all reached the same conclusion: they already hold the data and the attention, so why not monetise it?

Meanwhile, in actual media, S&P Global’s Market Intelligence division shows what disciplined audience-building looks like when it is done properly. Its Capital IQ platform serves around 360,000 professional users — investment bankers, corporate strategists, sector analysts — and generated $4.9 billion in revenue and $991 million in operating profit last year. Steve Matthewson, the division’s head of news, credits this to understanding each user’s daily workflow in granular detail, then building habit and trust around content only S&P can supply.

Why it matters

I’ve long been an advocate of marketing teams looking, thinking and acting like media companies — we talked about it back in January 2023 - but when entire companies start doing that, it worries me. I was up in arms when Apple announced it was going to start putting ads in its Maps app. What matters here is the nature of the product and whether or not you’ve earned the right to sell ads next to it.

A publisher earns that right because readers arrive by choice, know they are consuming media, and are free to leave. S&P Global’s audience trusts its data, that’s the entire product. A bank’s customers have no equivalent choice; they did not sign up for a media relationship, they signed up for financial services, and a card statement is evidence, not content. Rightly or wrongly, people are protective of their data and the moment a financial institution starts selling access to that, I think it’s putting the trust of its customers at risk.

Tailored advertising, done well, is genuinely useful, of course. A relevant offer beats a generic one every time, and relevance earns forgiveness when the audience knows they are being sold to. Do it through a channel built on custody rather than content though, and that dynamic changes. In financial services, that particular kind of drift is one customers, and maybe even regulators, will eventually notice.

What to do about it

Take action

You don’t have 70 million retail customers to sell advertising against, but you do have something Matthewson would recognise: a niche, high-value audience whose trust is the entire product. Are you building content around their segment, persona and daily workflow the way S&P Global does, or are you just broadcasting to a category?

Where in your own client relationships might you be tempted to run a version of Citi’s experiment? Could you actually add value with relevant ads? Would a vendor paying for visibility in front of your buyers, sponsored placements inside a client platform, insight sold on the back of client data be useful? Would you defend that decision to the client whose relationship funded it?

② If a client discovered tomorrow that your firm had profited from something learned about them without their agreement, would it read as an extension of the relationship or a betrayal of it? In B2B that answer travels fast: a networked, procurement-driven buyer base hears about a breach of trust far quicker than millions of anonymous retail customers ever would.

I think what I’m saying is, in regulated B2B financial services, if you’re going to follow in the footsteps of a clown, tread carefully.

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Top stories

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

FINANCIAL SERVICES

AI may increase demand for financial advice, study finds

③ Savvy AI use should lead to two better-informed humans talking sooner.

M&G’s Investor Compass finds four in 10 UK financial advisers expect demand for advice to rise over the next five years as AI becomes more mainstream, with a further 39% expecting demand to hold steady — only 18% predict a fall. Ninety-six per cent of investors with an adviser say ongoing professional advice remains important, and nearly six in 10 without one think it would improve their long-term outcomes. Yet most investors aren’t using AI themselves: 63% have never turned to it for investment decisions and just 13% use it regularly, even as 75% of advisers already do, mainly to cut admin time. M&G’s Ross Liston put it plainly: “AI can support those conversations, but it cannot replace the human judgement and trust that sit at the heart of great advice.”

This report is a PR stunt — nobody commissions research predicting their own redundancy — and it woefully ignores the fact that AI use by clients looking for advice is growing exponentially. Financial firms offering advice should follow suit. As ever with a new tool though, the key is how you use it. The goal should be to get two better-informed humans, two humans who are closer to a buying decision than they would be without it, talking to each other sooner.

Marketers need to think about how they get found by AI and how their product teams harness AI to make the user experience more delightful. When a prospective client asks an AI system to compare providers in your sector, does your firm’s expertise actually show up in the answer? Where in your own product could AI make the client’s research phase richer, so they arrive at your door with some affinity and asking sharper questions?

FINTECH

UK banks pilot tokenised deposit transactions

④ To market financial infrastructure, you need to focus on the why, not the how.

Seven of the UK’s biggest banks — Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander — have completed the country’s first interbank transactions using tokenised sterling deposits, moving digital versions of ordinary commercial bank money between separate institutions. Run under UK Finance’s Great British Tokenised Deposit programme on a shared ledger built by Quant, the trials covered two remortgage payments and a simulated online marketplace purchase. Treasury minister Lucy Rigby called it a milestone. Four days earlier, the European Central Bank made its own move at the wholesale level, launching Pontes, which settles tokenised trades in central bank money rather than commercial deposits or stablecoins; president Christine Lagarde called it a step toward a more integrated, innovative and resilient European market, while board member Piero Cipollone took to the pages of The Economist to make the case that digital finance still needs central banks.

I spent four years as Quant’s chief marketing officer and the recurring challenge was tackling the ‘this is a solution in search of a problem’ sceptics. Before we could persuade anyone that we had the best technology, we had to explain why they would even want it. Commercial banks and central banks are now walking the same ground, and both risk the misstep of leading with the mechanism rather than the pain it removes. Tell a corporate treasurer that deposits can now be ‘tokenised’ and watch her eyes glaze over; tell her it will dramatically increase her liquidity and the conversation gets going with gusto.

If you’re marketing new infrastructure, resist starting with the technology. Start with the lack of liquidity, the three-day wait for settlement, the phone call chasing lawyers, and only then explain what removed it. Test every sentence of your positioning against one question: would a client with zero interest in your technology still find this useful? If your answer needs a diagram, you’ve done it wrong.

MEDIA & MARKETING

City law firm to rebrand after co-founder demands name be stripped

⑤ If your company’s name includes the founder’s name, you better have a plan B.

US disputes lawyer Harris Pogust, who co-founded Pogust Goodhead in 2018, says he intends to file a cease-and-desist to have his name removed from the firm. The move follows the firm’s legal action against members of its own client committee in the £36bn Mariana dam claim against BHP, after a rival firm said it would take over the case. Pogust, who stepped down as chairman last year, said he was “embarrassed” to see his name on a claim filed against people who “lost everything.” A Pogust Goodhead spokesperson said that neither founder has any role in the firm today and that it “intends to move away from the Pogust Goodhead name.”

Who’s in a name, eh? For every Bloomberg there’s a Barings. The former is still inextricably linked to its founder whether he’s CEO or not; the latter continues to trade on a name whose founding family lost the bank in 1995 and has had nothing to do with it since MassMutual bought it. Clients, journalists and regulators read a name and assume it tells them who’s accountable. Increasingly, it doesn’t — and untangling a name from the people or events attached to it is far harder than attaching it was in the first place.

Dropping “Pogust” from “Pogust Goodhead” doesn’t feel quite right for a City law firm, does it? If your brand still carries a founder’s or partner’s name, work out now — not mid-crisis — who actually owns the trademark, what your partnership or shareholder agreement says about removing it, and how quickly you could execute a rename if you had six weeks rather than six years. Build brand equity that lives independently of any one person’s name, so a messy departure doesn’t force an emergency rebrand under a journalist’s gaze.

WILDCARD

How speech patterns shape opportunity at work

⑥ A distinctive voice should be celebrated and nurtured by your organisation.

Source: Harvard Business Review, 25 September 2026

New research, drawing on 40 years of census and labour-market data plus audio recordings from over 40,000 workers, has found that employees whose speech patterns match a workplace’s dominant style are seen as having stronger social skills — regardless of whether they actually do. The effect was strongest in client-facing, persuasion-heavy roles. The relationship between social skills and the level of social interaction in one’s work was at least 2.5 times stronger when workers spoke like the cultural group most dominant in the workplace.

Someone should call HR about this. But I think the communications team has some reflecting to do too. Anyone who has worked for more than one organisation knows that each seems to adopt its own register: the vocabulary and cadence the leadership team speaks in, the tone that gets nodded along to in the boardroom, the quirky expressions that get passed down through the ranks. (Can you guess where I picked up ‘we need to eat our own dog food’?) That register quietly decides who gets put forward as spokesperson, who gets media-trained, who “sounds like a leader.” Financial services, already instinctively cautious, narrows the pool further: an executive whose voice doesn’t match the house style can be sharp and persuasive and still get passed over for the podium.

As AI automates many tasks, the way one communicates will matter ever more. Leaders need to broaden their definition of what’s a good ‘fit’. Spokespeople should be scored on clarity of thought and command of the material first — assess delivery style only afterwards, as a separate step. And when building media training, seek to sharpen a person’s own voice rather than smoothing it into the house accent.

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Sarah Olney MP on the economic damage of Brexit:

Sarah Olney MP. Source: City AM, 21 September 2026

“If we want global investors to view Britain as a launching pad for international scale, it is absolutely essential that we have frictionless trade with our nearest and largest market. Forging much deeper ties with the EU by joining the single market and a new customs union is an essential next step.”

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Wishing you an industrious week,

P.S. Who are you spending today with? I spent last Sunday with Bogart and Bacall.