Key Takeaways
- Shift your reporting from volume to intent. Leadership wants to know whether marketing is moving the right people forward, not how many people saw something.
- Evolving your metrics is a change management challenge as much as a data one. You have to bring people along on the “why.”
- The “Renaissance Marketer” (interdisciplinary, AI-literate, and at ease with ambiguity) is hard to hire for. Investing in upskilling existing talent is often the more realistic path.
- Content scaling remains a protected investment, but human judgment still must drive what gets scaled and how.
- External partners are increasingly expected to bring AI capability and work in hybrid models alongside in-house teams. A single large agency relationship is giving way to a more flexible bench.
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The pressure on marketing teams in financial services has been building for years. Tighter budgets, leaner headcounts, more scrutiny from leadership, and a technology landscape that changes faster than most teams can absorb. The question used to be: are we doing enough? Increasingly, it has become: can you prove it?
That was the backdrop for our recent panel discussion, “Proving Marketing Value in a Margin-Squeezed World,” which brought together senior marketing and operations leaders from Alliance Bernstein, Franklin Templeton, and Citi. What emerged wasn’t a single playbook, but a set of honest observations from people navigating the same pressures in different ways.
The measurement conversation is shifting
Across all three organizations, one theme came through clearly: volume metrics are becoming less important to senior leadership. Page hits, email opens, and the number of campaigns completed – these numbers aren’t ignored, but they’re no longer the whole story.
Amanda Curran from Alliance Bernstein put it plainly: “Quantity does not necessarily mean you’re doing a good job. It’s more like, what’s the impact? Where are we driving that impact?”
At Franklin Templeton, Jillian Bannister described a deliberate move toward what she called “buying readiness” signals, meaning metrics that reflect where a prospect is in their decision journey rather than how many times they clicked something. “It’s really about the quality. Are we preparing someone who’s ready to buy?”
This isn’t just a reporting preference. It’s a shift in how marketing earns its seat at the table. The teams gaining influence are the ones connecting their activity to pipeline and revenue in a convincing way, not just demonstrating they were busy. And it’s not a clean transition. Curran was candid that change management is an integral part of the work. Getting leadership to trust a new set of numbers means explaining the why, not just changing what you report.
Upskilling is important, but it’s not just about AI
Every panelist mentioned AI, but the more interesting conversation was about the kind of marketer who can actually put it to use. The term that kept surfacing was the “Renaissance Marketer,” someone who combines deep expertise in one area with genuine fluency across others.
Bannister described it as a T-shaped profile: “Yes, you can have an expertise in some certain area… but I have to have awareness of how other areas connect into my special area of expertise.”
Peter Amadeo from Citi put the AI moment in historical perspective: “I equate it to somebody plunking a PC on your desk in 1983 and saying – figure out how to make this thing work for us. We’re figuring out how [AI] is going to create the way we work for the next couple of decades.”
The upskilling imperative isn’t purely technical either. Bannister was direct about this: “It’s not just about skills, it’s about being agile… getting comfortable with change.” That’s a cultural challenge as much as a training one, and it plays out differently in large, matrixed organizations where not everyone is moving at the same pace.
Content scaling is the investment nobody wants to cut
When asked what they would protect in a budget crunch, the panel converged quickly: content, and specifically the ability to produce and scale it efficiently. But Amadeo added a qualifier worth holding onto.
“AI’s not there yet,” he said. “We can’t lose sight of the humanistic view of the content that we’re creating, because at the end of the day, we’re not trying to market to AI, we’re trying to market to people.”
That’s a grounding point in an environment where the efficiency argument for AI-generated content is hard to ignore. Scale matters. So does not losing the signal in the noise.
The consistent thread across the conversation is that financial services marketing is being held to a higher standard of proof, while also being asked to operate with less. The teams navigating that well aren’t doing it by cutting corners or automating their way out of it. They’re getting clearer on what actually matters and building the case with evidence that leadership finds defensible.
It is clear that none of this is a new challenge. But, the expectations around these challenges are moving more quickly than ever. Standing still in the face of this environment isn’t really an option, and savvy marketers need to take the lead in charting the course of change.
Watch the webinar on-demand to hear the full conversation and learn more from the panel.
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