InMarketing Today

Anthropic, the developer of Claude, published its prospectus today, starting the countdown to one of the largest initial public offerings ever, the Financial Times reports. The 240,000-word filing shows first-half revenue of $16.3bn, up from $1.2bn a year earlier, alongside a net loss of $81bn, more than $72bn of it from revaluing convertible notes as the company's valuation rose. Its five largest clients supplied a quarter of revenue in the nine months to September, and existing investors expect it to seek a valuation of $1.5tn to $1.75tn.

A prospectus is marketing written under legal liability, and this one reads like it. The founders warn that their models have been found to "manipulate or subvert" monitoring, and the filing says its risks "may compound or trigger cascading adverse effects". For a company whose brand rests on safety, that candour is the positioning: spelling out what could go wrong makes the growth figures easier to believe. The founders even repeat the advice they were given: "Never let your company be worth a dollar more than it is actually worth."

Read your own risk disclosures, annual report and fund documents as a sceptical buyer would. If the downside is buried in boilerplate while the upside gets the headline, rewrite both in the same plain language and put them on the same page. A reader who has to dig out the risk alone stops believing the rest.

Aviva Investors, the asset management arm of the UK insurer Aviva, has launched a tokenised share class of its largest fund, the £22bn Sterling Liquidity Fund, on the XRP Ledger with the blockchain payments firm Ripple, The Block reported today. Aviva put £50m of its own money into the share class, taking its investment across two tokenised money market offerings to more than £86m. The fund itself stays off-chain: investors' holdings are represented on-chain as a "digital twin", and BNY Mellon holds the assets.

The selling point is sameness. Aviva says the tokenised shares carry the same investment objective, risk profile, liquidity and regulatory protections as the conventional fund, and it names a custodian every corporate treasurer already knows. For a cash product, that is the right pitch: nobody moves liquidity to try a new technology, but they will move it for a better process that keeps the old guarantees. Seeding the share class with £50m of its own capital says more about conviction than any adjective in the announcement.

If you are bringing a new technology to a conservative buyer, lead with what stays the same: the objective, the protections, the custodian, the regulator. Then show your own money in it. Explain the technology last, and only to the people who ask.

Being found in Google, ChatGPT or Perplexity does not win a business buyer; the website still has to turn the visit into trust, writes Scott Gillum, founder and chief executive of Carbon Design, in MarTech today. He cites research from 6sense showing that buyers complete nearly 70% of the buying process before speaking to a seller, and that 81% already have a preferred vendor at first contact. The median business-to-business website session lasts 78 seconds, according to Databox, and only 35.7% of buyers rate their experience of seller websites as somewhat or very positive.

Gillum proposes cognitive-load testing: measuring how hard a buyer must work to understand, trust and act on a site. His sharpest idea is the evidence chain of claim, metric, source, methodology and product capability. Words such as "industry-leading" and "transformative", he notes, raise more questions than they answer, and the same vagueness confuses the artificial intelligence systems that now summarise your firm before a buyer arrives. In financial services, where the late-joining risk officer reads the website before the final pitch, an unsupported claim is a lost vote.

Give your website the 78-second test. Ask a colleague outside marketing to find your three biggest claims and the evidence behind each. Where they cannot, put the figure, source and date beside the claim, use one name for each product on every page, and offer a next step other than "Contact sales".