Just back from Financial Promoter Live, the event for marketers in financial services, in London yesterday, so I thought I’d share some of the insights and learnings I got from the event although, for ease of reading, I’ve pulled subjects together from different keynotes and panels.
Authenticity and Branding
Right from the first keynote, the tone was set by Joe McGrath of Rhotic Media mentioning McKinsey’s report from November 2025: Past forward: The modern rethinking of marketing’s core, that after years of focus on performance marketing, CMOs are now highlighting branding as their key focus for 2026. Perhaps unsurprising given the effect of the clickless search on SEO and affiliates and the ever-soaring costs of paid search and paid social.
One of the main themes throughout the event was ‘authenticity’ and how communication and content needed to be authentic (as you can see, this was also flagged by McKinsey in the report mentioned above). And particularly how good content and creative can help brands stand out against the volume of AI-slop. While the usefulness of AI, in terms of research and content drafting, was acknowledged, it was described as normative and Miriam Boote of Designate said that “good creative that makes you stop and think will always win over AI produced content.” Jayne Fieldhouse of RBC Global Asset Management said that AI “can get you 80% of the way there, but you can’t rely on it.” And Benjamin Bracken of Insure TV said that the deluge of AI created content had increased the demand for video interviews where people can showcase the expertise and experience that they have in their heads, that can’t just be copied by a competitor using AI.
Alex Murphy from Balance gave an example from a UK insurer he used to work for, where he said everyone knew the brand but didn’t know what it stood for, other than low prices. He said that brand awareness, and awareness of the values of the brand, can have benefits in terms of price elasticity, something that Virginie Faucon agreed with, particularly in the case of AXA Health, which is a premium service.
In one panel, the speakers mentioned how brokers and intermediaries have not typically spent much time developing their own brands, instead relying on the reputation of the insurance brands that they represent, which was perhaps considered to be a mistake.
Broadcasting Trust and Brand Values
In separate panels, both Christian Cowie from the Nottingham Building Society and Virginie Faucon said that your customers don’t really care about how long your company has been in existence even, if like AXA you’ve been around for 500 years, and instead they care about the service they get today and, in the case of an insurer, whether a claim gets paid. This was particularly true of younger consumer groups. Virginie said that a brand can’t claim to be trusted, partly as every brand tries to say they are trusted, but mostly as trust exists in the minds of each consumer depending on their own experience of the brand. It’s something you earn customer by customer rather than claim.
Michelle Pickard of the Coventry Building Society said that a financial services brand needs to be very clear about its purpose and communicate that, and as their main aim is to help ordinary people save and own their own home, they communicate based on this. Christian Cowie mentioned that while banks are closing branches, building societies now represent well over 30% of all branches in the UK and that’s something to communicate. Michelle said that branches aren’t cheap but being owned by members rather than shareholders allows them to take different decisions. She explained how trust can be fostered by giving back to the communities they serve and that they sponsor Coventry City Football Club and the Coventry Building Society Arena, which not only resonate with their members but also allows them to use those facilities to help vulnerable groups.
Matt Field from Aventum said that people don’t really understand insurance and that’s why it’s important to communicate brand values and what you stand for. Virginie Faucon mentioned how AXA did a campaign about domestic violence. Alex Murphy, however, noted that too many brands misunderstand what story telling is about: it shouldn’t be the brand telling its story, it should be about the customer and the customer’s story. Virginie agreed and gave an example of how AXA Global Health use real customer stories about health repatriation to connect with customers.
Virginie also gave an interesting example of how changing your colors and messages can actually lead customers to think that the ad is phishing or spoofing. So perhaps a value in staying true to your traditional colors and fonts, even though they’re mostly blue in insurance.
Messages customers are listening to
Matt Field said that there’s never been more competition for customer attention and he also referred to the effect of what he called ‘the Martin Lewis generation’ where customers are more informed and more skeptical than ever. He said that customers will listen to simple easy to understand messages that get across key messages in a succinct fashion with a supporting fact such as ‘we answer X% of calls within Y seconds’ rather than bland statements like ‘we have great customer service’.
Virginie said that useful information, like destination health guides work really well, as they provide useful and easy to digest information for consumers.
Outsmarting not outspending your competitors
A recurring topic was how many of the brands that presented said that they could never hope to outspend their competitors, and so had to out-execute or out-smart them. A great presentation from Ed Birth of Hiscox showed how the brand realized that, unable to outspend some of its large competitors, it couldn’t accept average content and, while keeping with the overall look and feel of the brand, decided to humanize the messages by homing in on the actual concerns their customers had and combining that with humor. It did this by looking into the case histories to understand the challenges that many of the small and micro businesses they insured faced and then communicated these across OOH, radio and newspapers using deliberate typos, upside down ads etc. Examples included the CEO having to explain to the CTO why a colleague clicked an infected link, when in a micro-business this was one and the same person in all three roles, or a blank page in the newspaper saying ‘you missed the deadline for the print run for your client’s ad’. With many of these ads being carried in lower cost channels, like the press, they achieved a huge increase in unprompted awareness, but also across prompted awareness and saw benefits in SEO and paid search click rates, and this contributed to record profits.
This theme was continued in the panel with Michelle Pickard and Christian Cowie, and in particular, Christian who explained how a smaller brand can get great coverage by being a bit cheeky on social media, giving the example of them countering a mistake by a financial service brand who posted ‘don’t let the shareholders of banks and building societies decide’ by pointing out that building societies, as mutuals, don’t have shareholders.
Gamification
An interesting aside in one of the panels discussed the role of gamification and the the success of the Vitality model of rewarding policyholders for taking actions that improve their health. Alex Murphy said that lots of brands have tried gamification but the success of Vitality was scaling that. Virginie Faucon said that they’ve looked at that model a lot, but it’s harder to do at a global level, and they struggle to see the connection between these actions and loss ratios. There was some skepticism on the panel as to the long term effects of gamification and whether the brand could retain these policyholders long term, and whether they “just joined for an Apple watch.”
The Impact of AI in Communications
An interesting panel discussed the communication risks from AI and David Poulteney from Augment Risk pondered a brand’s ability to create its own deepfakes by having the C-Levels represented by very lifelike avatars. Benjamin Bracken said that this could very dangerous when something looks legitimate but the person who appears to have said something never actually did, and maybe never even thought about it.
The panel talked abut the need to maintain consistency in messaging and to stick to the communication playbooks in a crisis, given the ability of AI to amplify messages.
Hiring in the AI generation
Inevitably the conference pondered the impact of AI, and in one respect, the first keynote said that young candidates for marketing roles have never arrived with as many technical and AI skills as now. So the challenge is less to teach them tech, but to impart critical thinking processes.
The return of physical events
A later panel discussed the return to popularity of physical events due to the need to create experiences and have a human touch. The key elements were to know what success should look like, have the right venue and invite the right people and the content was the ‘cherry on the top’. One useful bit of advice was not to give attendees too much choice at events, as it becomes confusing, but provide personalized agendas.
If you’d like to discuss any of these and how to how to market your insurance or financial services business, please feel free to get in touch.