Known for his expertise in digital-first campaigns and strategic capability development, Rick has a proven track record of driving brand growth and innovation in highly competitive markets.

Join us as Rick shares insights from his journey and discusses the future of marketing in the financial services industry. Rick, thank you for coming down and joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

Could you kick us off by giving us a bit of background to what led you to your current role at AllianceBernstein?

Yeah, absolutely. So I moved to London twenty years ago, straight after uni.

I studied marketing at uni.

I always knew I was gonna go into finance and business, but I'm not a maths person, so marketing and advertising were kind of where I looked at uni to progress to.

Moved here in 2004, and then I basically, six months later, started at BNY Mellon before it was BNY Mellon. Right. So I joined there to help with institutional marketing across EMEA.

Coming from Australia and being twenty one, I had to learn pretty quickly that every single market is very different. But I also didn't know anything about finance, you know, talking about equities and fixed income and anything else like that, and I had no point of reference, so I had to learn all that pretty quickly.

I was there for a couple of years before the merger with BNY took place, so my role was still doing institutional marketing, which then had to move into kind of brand management and brand refresh across EMEA.

At that time, we're talking 2005, 2007, 2008, it was all press advertising and not really moving into the digital space.

I was there for about four or five years and then went to JPMorgan Asset Management where I moved into the UK intermediary team. So again, it's still an American company but working in a regional office, and this time now having to learn about financial advisers and discretionary.

And around that time, you're looking at the shift into more digital marketing and the kind of emergence of social media. So it was an interesting opportunity where I got to start with institutional and brand, but then go into intermediary and product.

So I was there for eight-ish years before going to Schroders. So I joined Schroders initially to look after strategic capabilities, which if you think of it as asset class marketing — equities, credit, multi-asset — but with some client needs in there like income, retirement, sustainability.

And I guess my role there was really coordination across all markets that Schroders was present in, but what was the narrative for each of the ten areas?

How does it differ between institutional, intermediary and ultimately end consumer? So learning that kind of third segment within financial services.

A lot of that was around coordination between marketing, sales, product and investment to help define what each of those strategic capabilities were, but also roll those out globally. You can't talk to an institutional client the same way you talk to a retail client versus an end consumer, but you have to have the same starting point.

So I did that for a few years at Schroders, but my role started to shift a bit more into the campaign side of it. So not necessarily just the narrative, but also then how do you activate that?

So for example, how do you activate with a Japanese institutional client versus an American institutional client? It's the same narrative you're telling, but it's activated in a very different way.

And my focus there for my last few years was around predominantly sustainability and private assets, which I think we'll come on to — the sustainability campaign shortly — and I was there for about five years before recently joining AllianceBernstein, where my role is that campaign coordination, but predominantly across EMEA.

And I think AllianceBernstein is coming from a slightly different starting point as to where Schroders was.

Yeah.

So that brings us up to present day.

Right now. A couple of points that I just wanna drill into a little bit more. So I think when you said at the beginning that you had to kind of learn pretty quickly about the product sets — the services that asset managers offer — coming into that space can initially seem very, very complex. How did you kind of close that gap rapidly? And you did it twice. You started on the institutional side and then went over onto the intermediary side. So any advice for people new into the industry?

To what I would say to anyone: be upfront with that. Every interview I've gone to — because I didn't touch on it — there was a six-month company in there as well that was around FX and crypto.

Okay.

But be upfront. I've said it in every interview right from when I first moved to London, like, I don't know these products. I don't know what an equity is or what a fixed income product is, but I'm willing to learn. What I do bring is those marketing skills.

Yeah.

And also, when I start the job, if someone says something I don't understand, I will put my hand up and say, sorry, could you just explain that to me? One of my favourite activities, or one of the favourite things that I did with some fund managers at JPMorgan, was we were writing an absolute return brochure for end consumers.

And I said to them, like, every time you use a word, I'm gonna play the end consumer. Every time you use a word I don't understand, I'm gonna ask you to explain it.

So they said, you know, this fund can go long. I was like, what's that?

Like, oh, okay. So, you know, you're buying a share in Apple. I'm like, great.

And it's like, and it can also go short.

I'm like, oh, so is that selling a share?

And you could just see their face drop. And they're like, I think this is gonna take a bit longer than we thought it was going to.

Yeah, yeah. So it is. I mean, it's a jargon-filled industry, isn't it? And especially now for end consumer stuff — consumer duty — you're kind of being asked to double down on that. A lot of people just don't realise that we're all innate in our own biases with that jargon.

Yeah. And ultimately, you know, whether it's an institutional client, intermediary client or consumer, everyone's still like that. You're just people.

So you've still got the same three seconds to grab someone's attention on social media. So if something seems too complicated or too technical, mentally you kind of glance at it — I don't understand that — I'll just move on to the next thing.

So it's trying to treat people like people, whether that's through promotion or even just when you start a job. You know? Other people start jobs and they don't understand things, so why can't I ask the same questions?

Yeah. The second point that I wanted to ask about is that you said different audiences you speak to in a different way. And within my career, I've only really done marketing for retail or intermediaries, never really institutional. So just for my knowledge, can you give me a bit of an overview of how the marketing is different within the messaging to institutional versus the other two sets?

I'd say more and more the messaging — I'll probably rephrase my earlier statement in that case — the messaging probably gets more similar across the audience types.

The activation is probably more different now than it used to be.

Okay.

They used to be — if I think back to when I started at BNY Mellon and even when I was at JPMorgan — clients are really clever. They like fifty-page PDFs and they like to watch two-hour webinars and they want data and they want, like, see it. That's true. Some probably do, but they also don't. They also like to watch funny videos on YouTube.

They're also time-poor.

Well, exactly. And so I think that was the shift since we've moved to more social, digital, video-led creatives or content.

The activation is different. You know, obviously institutional clients have certain publications that end consumers don't visit. But again, it's about short consumable pieces, like I said before.

You've still got the same few seconds to grab someone's attention.

To your question, do you speak to them differently? I guess the only real difference is you can use some more of that jargon with institutional clients.

You do run a risk with certain types of institutional clients where they can feel like they're being talked down to.

But I would say, for the most part, most people just want something that's easy to consume. Yeah. Because every other asset manager or financial company is trying to get their message in front of the same client, so yours just has to cut through. And if you're all just being very technical, is that creating any cut-through?

From my perspective, from an agency, we obviously have the unique position that we work with multiple asset management firms, so we can see different styles. And I've definitely worked with some organisations where the way you talk to advisory clients is very different from how you talk to retail. And I've definitely worked with some clients that go, you know what, we talk to everyone the same.

And actually the simplicity — from my perspective — I always think that's more forward-thinking. But that's… I do like things explained to me in simple terms. So it could be that. I don't know.

But yeah.

And particularly when you think of newer investment types — the things that I've been talking about recently, like systematic investing — again, people know about these things, but you don't wanna assume people know about these things. No one wants to feel stupid doing that.

No, no, no.

So you don't want to sit in a room where I start talking to you about systematic investing and you nod and pretend you know what I'm talking about when you don't. Because actually, if I gave you a quick — by systematic investing what we mean is this — it took me a few seconds, but all of a sudden you're on the same page as me, and people don't want to feel like they're missing out.

No. I mean, I'm going off on one here, but we did research very early on with savers that weren't investors. And one of the questions we had to ask them was why don't you invest? And they said when we go on those websites, it makes us feel stupid because we don't understand anything. Why are you gonna put your money into something that makes you feel stupid?

Yeah. And the flip side is they put their money there and then they're checking their investments on a daily basis because they think all investing is a quick win. It was like, well, it's not. It never has been.

Yeah.

And I think to that point, that's why we need to speak to multiple people. That's why you write pieces that are retail-friendly, and you activate them to different types of clients because one institutional client will know more than another institutional client. But from a mass marketing perspective — and by mass marketing, obviously tailored — if I'm going out to everyone, I can't bespoke everything, so I need to kind of cater for most people.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's get back on track.

So going back to your background — lots of different asset managers — not lots, but a number of different asset managers — coming over from Australia, working across different areas. When you look back on that time, what do you think are the biggest challenges that you've worked on within that period within marketing for the different audience types?

I'd say first and foremost was probably BNY Mellon, going from Mellon to BNY Mellon. I'd never been part of a merger slash a rebrand, let alone having to roll that out across the whole continent.

So that was a personal challenge for me. Not challenges in, like — it was a good challenge, not as in it was challenging.

But you have to learn that very quickly. I had feedback when we were trying to roll out this brand in EMEA from certain markets saying, oh, we don't really like the colours or the logo, so we're just not gonna use it. And I was twenty three, twenty four.

That's a lot of responsibility at that point.

Well, yeah. My manager was also obviously there. But having to be like, well, the company that doesn't exist anymore — you have to use this — and just being told, no, we're not going to. Wow.

So I had to learn a lot about people too.

And I'd say the other kind of challenge that has popped up throughout my career in marketing is the emergence of digital marketing. You know, I started doing press advertising and events. And then went to JPMorgan where we were still doing press advertising and events, but now we're talking about more display advertising, social media.

I launched the UK adviser Twitter account at JPMorgan, which was the first asset management professional Twitter account that I'd seen globally. So I was really pleased with that. And we had, you know, I think it was about eight thousand followers when I left, which out of an audience of fifteen thousand in the UK was pretty high numbers.

You can't just launch a Twitter account at a big company like JPMorgan. There are steps that you have to take. Compliance is big, and IT risk and legal, and you need to get a lot of people comfortable that I'm not going out there trying to sell something on Twitter. I'm just trying to get our content out in a different place where our clients are.

But I guess from my side, I really enjoy that piece. I enjoy looking at new technologies in marketing and I really enjoy the analytics piece too.

So having to learn all of that — you know, press advertising, you stick it out there, it goes on ten thousand back covers, brilliant. Whereas actually with digital, you could start showing what's working, what are people engaging with, how do you optimise.

And I think that's what I've taken forward in my career from JPMorgan to Schroders to AllianceBernstein — I really like the data side and I really like the digital side.

And at the time, it was a challenge. Back to that point on Twitter, I had someone in the team say to me when I said we wanted to do this Twitter account, oh, social media, yeah, that's just a fad. Like, it won't be around for a while. But why would you think any different?

So you kind of spend time putting your eggs in this basket that someone next to you doesn't necessarily believe in.

Yeah.

But I really enjoy it. And if something works, that's great. And if something doesn't work from a marketing side, that's usually better because I can then say, like, hey, I tried this thing, it didn't work. Why didn't it work? How do we make this even better than what it was?

What you're describing there is an environment where you're kind of allowed to try things and fail. Were you blessed to have managers that would accept that as a way of working, or do you think that that is fairly true of most marketing organisations or most marketing departments in asset management?

I would say I was blessed to work for companies that would let you try, yeah, and fail on the provision that you would start and say, like, hey, this is what we think will happen. We're going into unexplored territory here.

Yeah.

I don't know if that's true of all companies, but I think, you know, in my career I've had managers who have allowed me to do that. And that's what I take into when I manage my teams over the years. I love it when someone's like, hey, we want to try this thing, or hey, we tried this thing, it didn't work, so we're going to do it again and do this instead.

Because I think that's the opportunity I was given.

And yeah, I think that's hopefully true of most managers, but I don't know.

No.

Well, you see more?

Yeah. I don't think it is. I think, you know, everyone would say that that's the ideal, but I think the reality is often far from that. But I agree that giving that openness to say, hey, look, don't worry, don't beat yourself up over it. Let's just try something again. I think it's good for constant improvement.

And we as marketers don't always talk about the things that go wrong. No. And again, I would always say to anyone in my team or anyone that I work with in marketing: if something works, brilliant, tell people. If something doesn't work, that's a bigger learning point for a room full of marketers than something that did work. You know what, that's great.

And that's advice I should heed here because whenever I come to speak to you, the first thing I say is tell me about something that you've done really well that you're really proud of. And actually it'd be a great question to say, tell me about something that really blew up and you learned from.

That would be, yeah, I'll take that away. Don't ask me that now. I don't know.

But let's stick to the original plan.

So we talked about campaigns which are challenging from a launching point of view. What about something that you kind of look back on and you go, yeah, you know what, that is something that I am very proud of and I can talk about as a best-practice example?

Yeah. I mean, practice is something I can talk about now, but I'd say I'll talk through the Beyond Profit campaign that I worked on at Schroders. But it's best practice in hindsight. At the time, it was very much muddling through.

Okay.

So basically, when I joined Schroders, one of the areas I looked after was brand research, and we used a few agencies. And like I said, I looked after ten strategic capabilities. Sustainability was one of them, so it was ten percent of a focus as far as I was concerned as a new person there.

I went to a senior management meeting with the brand research and I said, you know what? Globally, Schroders is ranked twenty-third for sustainability as a brand attribute. And I was like, that's brilliant.

Everyone else in the room thought that was one of the worst things they'd ever heard.

Why?

Because Schroders is really good on the sustainability side, but being a British company, and very British, not necessarily wanting to tell people about it.

So I think everyone in that room thought we were going to be ranked higher. And I went back to my desk and I was like, well, I'm responsible for sustainability marketing, but it's one small part of a website. So if I don't know about it and it's part of my job, why would other people know about it?

So the campaign elements were there at Schroders, or the brand elements, but they were not amplified enough — probably the best way to put it.

So all through 2018 and 2019, a lot more of my focus was around the sustainability piece and working with people across the marketing team, but also understanding what we do from an investment side.

There was a Head of Sustainability, so working with her and the team, it was then about how do we build the prominence of sustainability at Schroders.

I'm not going to sit here and say, hey, I did this thing by myself. Actually, it was a senior management decision, which is great when it comes top down, because it's saying this is a brand attribute we want to be known for.

So having that senior management backing is great because then everyone kind of jumps on board.

But it wasn't just let's do this marketing campaign or let's run an ad campaign and change perception. It was: what does it look like from advertising? What's the content flow behind this? How do we create cut-through?

So it was around being digital-first, social-first. What does that look like for investment teams? What do they need to say? What's the internal training model? Because the way that you use the word sustainability and I use it might be different.

So how do we make sure everyone's using the same terminology across the building?

It took a while — these things don't happen overnight — but actually what's the brand framework and the narrative, and how does that apply to institutional, intermediary and end consumers? How does that work in thirty-seven countries?

So it's really mapping all of this out.

How do you go about answering that?

So you've got a lot of questions there that you need to go and find out.

So you're here in this room, you've gone bang — twenty-third — and that's gone down not in the intended way. Presumably they said we'd much rather be at X, Y, Z number.

Let's say top five was the goal.

Oh, top five.

Top five over three to five years.

Okay, so that's a big move. So how do you go from there? You know what you want to achieve, you've got all these characteristics, it's got to work in thirty-seven countries and across audiences — but how do you actually work out how to get there? What's the underlying strategy?

And again, this is where it becomes a combination of people and teams getting their heads together around the drawing board.

We've got this goal. Okay — top five over three to five years.

Brilliant. Well, we know what our ranking is with institutional and retail audiences. You can see what the ranking is globally, by region, by country type. Where are we strong? Where are we less strong?

Then it's getting those different stakeholders in place.

Like I said, it wasn't just a marketing campaign. It was across the business.

You've got people who are experts at writing content. So I'm not sitting there saying, hey, I know what to do here. I don't know the answer actually.

What I can do is coordinate people who do know the answer, because now we all have a shared goal.

Now let's break this down into the steps we need to take to get there.

Yeah. Almost: what can you contribute to help us move along this journey?

Exactly.

And I would say — and this was my first time at Schroders moving into a global role — it was also about getting local teams engaged right from the start.

I've seen companies launch campaigns and say, hey, here's this campaign launching tomorrow, you need to do stuff for this. I've actually been on the receiving end of that at American companies.

And by the time it reaches you, you're like, I can't use that. My clients won't like that. The message doesn't land here. The spelling's American spelling.

So my role was coordinating across local teams to get their input.

Now some countries have more prominence than others strategically and tactically. Some regions knew more about sustainability, while others didn't really care about it.

But you have to understand those nuances and bring everyone together.

Because I'm not going to move from twenty-third to top five overnight.

So I need everyone involved along the way.

And actually, by getting everyone engaged, it really helps form the narrative and the activation — and the socialisation of it with country heads.

We launched the campaign in 2021, I believe. Around the COVID time.

I know it was around COVID.

So just for full disclosure, I was in the room at the agency briefing for Beyond Profit.

Oh, okay.

Yeah — the big auditorium setup.

Exactly.

And it felt very different. This was being launched by Schroders with quite a bit of fanfare.

Everyone felt very proud of it within the business.

And not just the marketing team. You could ask a fund manager what Schroders was doing around sustainability and they'd have an answer, because they'd been brought along on the journey.

And by the time I finished at Schroders in 2023, we were ranked fifth globally for sustainability.

It achieved the objective.

Mic drop.

Exactly.

The goal was set in 2020 to happen over three to five years, and it happened within two and a half years.

That's fantastic.

So when you talk about accomplishments, I mean that one — I don’t know how many meetings I had talking about sustainability. One of my old managers at Schroders used to call me Mr Sustainability, just because that was all I was talking about for probably a good year.

Yeah.

Well, it should have only been ten percent of your time.

Yeah, exactly.

I do remember it. It felt so visually different and very bold. We’re an agency and we were charged with implementing it. I think we were the first agency to actually put an implementation out — it was a promotional video, so you’ve probably seen it.

Probably seen it at least five thousand times.

Yeah, yeah.

But we loved it because it felt so vibrant — very global in the way you had all of the specific uses for how faces were to be used with the lens logo as well.

It’s beautiful. And again, because we had that top-down push on it, we could easily have just said, we want to be in line with what our peers are doing. But we were like, no, we need to go beyond that, which is why Beyond Profit came about. Because we know that as an asset manager we still have a fiduciary duty to make our clients profit, but actually we also need to talk about what you get on top of that — and why it’s important to us as a business.

So straight away we were like: no pictures of wind farms and forests. We don’t want green advertising and green banners across the website, because this isn’t about a section of the website where we do quite well. This is about it being ingrained in our brand. It’s about the people, the planet, and our impact on that.

Well you must have felt quite proud then, because you did this pre-FCA guidelines on greenwashing. So you must have felt proud when those guidelines came out and you could say, you know what, we actually did it right the first time.

Yeah, we ticked the box as well.

Yeah. I think when the guidelines came out, probably every asset manager was like, okay, quickly — let’s just see what we’re doing versus what the requirements are. But back to my earlier point, we weren’t leaning into “everything we do is sustainable investing.” That was just one area of it.

We were asking: what is the impact on brand? What are our differentiators? What are our strengths? What’s the impact on product?

We had three tiers of a campaign that you could dial up or down based on what your clients know and who you’re talking to.

And I think that’s probably why it worked. It was a lot of work — not just by me, but by a lot of people — but it was such a proud moment when it launched. And the brand research showed us that actually we did this.

Yeah.

We did move the dial.

Yeah, that’s a fantastic achievement and a great legacy to have. It must have been hard work saying goodbye to that piece.

You mentioned earlier that you embrace trying new things and the challenge of new technology coming out — new marketing technology, new tools.

Within marketing we seem to be awash with martech at the moment, and it just keeps growing. How do you approach integrating that into your strategic work in a world that seems to be accelerating with the volume of products and technology on offer?

It’s interesting. You’ve mentioned martech, but there’s also ad tech, sales tech — so many different platforms that email you every day saying, “Hey, you should come speak to us.”

Your inbox must be full. You’re constantly getting invitations down to the Excel Centre or somewhere.

Yeah, exactly. Or someone offering to take me for lunch.

I think it’s about being realistic and breaking things down. I’ve embedded — again, not just me, but teams — platforms and martech over the years. A company comes in, sells you something, it gets put in place, and everyone moves on to the next thing.

But it’s actually about taking a step back and asking: what can this platform do, and how are we using it?

Some of these platforms can do a hundred things. But if I came to you and said, here’s a platform, it can do a hundred things — go — you’re not going to look at it. You’re not going to do any of them.

What I’ve found works is identifying the one or two things that are relevant right now and introducing those.

So maybe we’re about to run an email campaign and we use the platform to help with one small part of it. Then you can show the success of that through analytics and data. And then people say, okay, that worked — let’s add that to all our campaigns.

Then next time you launch something, you say: well, the same platform can also do this. And you gradually build it up.

So you attach martech and change to things people are already doing day to day.

Almost incremental change.

Yeah. Because new technologies can feel like more work. Even something like paid search — when I was at Schroders, not many countries were doing it. Not because they didn’t want to, but because it sounded complicated.

You talk about ad copy, keywords, account structure — all the jargon around it. People know they should do it but don’t know how.

So instead of twenty people around the world doing it twenty different ways, my team could coordinate it once, get local input, and embed it centrally.

It’s a small change, but it’s not adding days of work to twenty people — maybe fifteen minutes or half an hour. Then you can show the impact.

The moment paid search launched in some of those countries, a month later they were saying, should we include this in all our campaigns?

So it’s piece by piece rather than huge digital transformation projects.

Yeah. Those can work in some places, but in my experience it’s usually incremental change.

Over twenty years in marketing we’ve moved from centralised to decentralised models and back again. More recently, you hear about centres of excellence, because not everyone can know everything.

There are people smarter than me being paid to be experts in certain areas, so it’s about working together.

I’m going to take us back again — I seem to keep doing that. You mentioned earlier that the same message might need to be delivered differently across markets or audiences.

You’ve worked globally and now across EMEA. How do you map marketing messages so they resonate with diverse audiences across regions?

A couple of things.

First is getting the local teams involved early.

What does that entail?

It’s conversations. Picking up the phone and saying, hey, we’re doing this thing. It’s a strategic priority or there’s a tactical opportunity.

You say: we’re launching this in a few months and we value your feedback. There’s no impact on you right now, but later you might need to review translations or content. So you prepare people.

Once you start that engagement, people say, okay, how can I help?

Then when it comes to messaging, the narrative is never completely locked. It’s about crafting a central narrative — the brand attribute or product differentiator.

I always talk about a 70/30 model: seventy percent is the core narrative, but thirty percent can flex locally.

Because I don’t know the difference between a French institutional client and a French intermediary client as well as the local team does.

So you seek feedback from them?

Yeah, feedback is the right word. If you take a company like Schroders with thirty-seven countries, if thirty-seven people all input equally you get too many cooks.

You end up saying nothing.

Exactly. Everyone wants something slightly different and you end up with something safe.

A wind farm.

Exactly.

So you map who needs to be involved centrally and locally, create the framework, and think about the three tiers of campaign: brand, strengths/differentiators, and product.

Not every campaign uses all three equally, but thinking about them helps guide planning.

For example, if in APAC a few years ago sustainability wasn’t well known, you might start at a brand level: we are a sustainable brand.

Whereas in France they might already believe that, but not know the products — so you focus on product messaging.

But those tiers still connect, and that’s where the local flexibility comes in.

Almost like giving teams a toolkit.

Exactly.

So can you give us an overview of your role now and what you’re working on at AllianceBernstein?

Yeah. I’ve been there about four months.

I’ve been brought in to do something similar to what I did at Schroders, but specifically across EMEA. It’s a different starting point. There are already channel marketers in place, but it’s about understanding processes and making them more efficient.

In many companies teams grow organically and don’t always think about how processes can work across teams.

So part of my role is coordinating that.

There are also a couple of products we’re looking to launch or promote, but they’re very new. In the UK, financial advisers usually want a one-, two-, or three-year track record and a certain level of assets under management before they consider them.

So we need to start at a content-first, digital-first level to build awareness.

Almost an awareness game.

Exactly. So when the product reaches that track record stage, people already know it exists.

There’s also work happening around brand attributes and what we want to be known for, but like I said, I’m only four months in.

Yeah, it’s interesting how you enter a new role — understanding where the business is and what challenges you can help with immediately.

Exactly. Often it’s about saving people time. If I can streamline processes, it frees them up to focus on other things.

Have you got your crystal ball with you?

The tricky question.

Where do you see the future of marketing in financial services going?

Like I mentioned earlier, we’ve gone back and forth between centralised and decentralised models. I think the future will involve more experts in specific areas leading projects.

AI is obviously coming in strongly, as are new social platforms.

But you can’t have a hundred marketers around the world learning AI in a hundred different ways. You need specialists who focus on it and help the business adopt it effectively.

Analytics is another area that could be stronger. We’re good at reporting data, but sometimes we don’t start with clear goals.

In terms of platforms, social and programmatic are constantly evolving. Asset managers probably won’t jump on TikTok tomorrow, but we still need to be aware of it because future clients are there.

At some point there will be a tipping point.

On the AI side, many people see it as a tool to write content. And that’s helpful, but every asset manager has the same tool.

If everyone asks AI to write something about US equities, they’ll all get similar outputs. So there’s no cut-through.

The real differentiator is your opinion — what AllianceBernstein’s view is on US equities.

AI can help with the starting point, but your experts add the perspective.

Where I use AI most is things like writing creative briefs or generating ideas. Or identifying visual cues for campaigns.

So more for ideation.

Exactly. Also translations and efficiency tasks.

You sound very clear about where AI helps and where human expertise still matters.

Yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s meant to make parts of our work easier, not replace the expertise.

Two portfolio managers at the same company can have different views on a stock. That’s the nature of investing.

AI helps summarise things too. For example, if I need a short LinkedIn post, I can give AI a prompt and get twenty ideas back, then refine them.

Previously I might have spent half a day thinking of ideas.

So it saves time while still letting you shape the final output.

Exactly.

So just to sign off — what are your favourite AI tools for marketers?

Honestly, I mostly use Google Gemini as a starting point.

We’ve also explored things like DeepL for translations and HappyScribe for subtitles, transcription, and summaries. People also use ChatGPT.

The reason I like Gemini is it builds a profile from prompts. For example, I’m part of a running club and we write blog posts for it, so I’ll say, “Hey, it’s me again from the running club — can you tidy this text up?”

It feels like it understands context over time.

So you’ve invested time in training it.

Exactly.

I also like prompts like “act like a creative agency.” Ask for safe ideas and then bold ones — even ones that might scare compliance.

It sparks ideas.

Yeah, that’s great.

Rick, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights. I wish you all the success in your time at AllianceBernstein.

Thank you. Four months in — we’ll watch the space.

Thanks. Cheers.

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