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with Baillie Gifford's Ian Bruce · Two in Twenty

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to the next episode of 2 in 20.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Twinkfield.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully by now you've realised that I'm the host of these podcasts, and today I'm talking to Ian Bruce, who is the head of marketing campaigns at Bailey Gifford.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been noticing, he's been very busy leading a lot of marketing engagement and campaigns, particularly against the US activist Sabah in the investment trust industry.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: So we can talk about that quite a bit, as well as touching on how Bailey Gifford has built their position in the industry over decades.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about brand, AI, and all other good things like that.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: So over to my conversation with him.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Ian, hi, great to have you here with me today.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for taking the time.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe to kick us off, could you introduce yourself, give us a quick overview of your career, and then we can get into some questions?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, of course.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, firstly, Twink, thank you for having me on this podcast today.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh great to join you.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: And in terms of career, well, I'm not quite a one company man, but I've been at Bailey Gifford now for over 25 years.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: And um I've seen quite a period of change within that time.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: When I joined at Bailey Gifford, there was about 300 staff.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Our funds and management were about 20 billion.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: And now, rolling on to 2026, we've got about 1,600 staff, and our funds and management are over 200 billion.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I've seen quite a period of change within the company.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of what I do, I'm the head of marketing campaigns at Bailey Gifford's.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: I head up a marketing team.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's I think it's 11 of us now.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: And within that, we've got two different teams.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: We've got one team that focuses on all Bailey Gifford's marketing campaign, it's a content and advertising, and I also look after the email team as well.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: And in terms of my career itself, I report into James Buddons.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: And between James and I, we've probably got over 50 years experience in marketing investment trusts, which I think must be unrivalled for the novel industry.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, and we'll come, we'll come to that in a minute, because that's you've definitely been flexing those muscles recently.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess just to your point around seeing that incredible growth at Bailey Gifford, it'd be, you know, the reputation clearly in the UK market is so strong.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: What do you what do you think has been really driving that success and how you've managed to achieve that growth over the decades?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't it wasn't always that way.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when I joined Bailey Gifford, people on years maybe in an investment trust industry, but out with that, we didn't really have that brand awareness within the UK and also globally.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think about 15 years ago there was a real step change in attitudes.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: And part of that does coincide to when James joined the company, and a lot of credit also goes to Grant Walker, who had up our intermediary sales team.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: And 15 years ago, really up to marketing efforts.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's not just requiring an increase in spend, it requires increased commitment to people as well.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Where for investment trusts, we had we had the old-fashioned rappers.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: People can invest in ISA's and share plans and our children's plan.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: But we changed our marketing focus to look not just on the rapper products but on the trusts themselves.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously at the same time, more people were starting to invest because you had people investing directly in platforms such as Harvey's Landsdown.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, we increased our focus on OICs.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we're pushing out OIX directly to wealth managers and intermediaries, supporting the work of the sales team, who obviously at the same time were increasing their efforts.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that coincided with a shift in focus to do more PR.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was looking back at this last night, thinking, well, what what changed?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's a bit crazy to think now, but we first sent a marketing email in 2008.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what we were doing before then, but that's really sort of part of that change to do more emails, we started to do more content.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And also at the same time, it's probably fair to say we had a period of excellent performance at Billy Gifford itself.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't quite stars aligning, but everything came together.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: And over time, the cumulative effect of that, that was our brand awareness really started to improve across different markets, not just with intermetries, but with end investor as well.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: I guess also so much success over time comes back to trust, transparency, acting in a way that your investors expect you to.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so that sort of communication is so critical through all periods.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just thinking, you know, off often I see how peers are maybe reticent to really communicate through difficult markets or periods of underperformance or big overweights or something that haven't gone well.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Is that something that you have embraced and tackled and sort of lent in, I guess, where others have maybe shied away?
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely, yes.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't think when there's periods of poor performance, you can put your, you know, your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think we can trace this back to the response in the pandemic.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's nearly six years ago that we're all sent home with just our laptops and basically told to not quite get on of our jobs, but uh, you know, we've got jobs to do, and at the same time we're at home and a lot of us were homeschooling children and thinking about our loved ones and what was going to happen.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: But we were put in a completely different position from moving from a office-based environment to a home-based environment.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted to continue to communicate with our clients, so it was vitally important that they knew what was going on in terms of how we were reacting to this global situation.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And part of that reflects Bailey Gifford's shared beliefs.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's about putting the client first and trying to do the best service for our clients.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of the things that we took on and started to do during the early days of the pandemic have put us in good a good position now.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, we started to do a lot more webinars.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it's strange to think that pre-2020 we didn't really do webinars.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then suddenly that became speaking to people online like we're doing today, became the way that you spoke to your to your clients and prospects, near-end investors.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: We up to email communications and in some ways you reacted to the situation.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: So instead of having to handcraft performance and put it on our website, we were breaking the rules and sticking 1500 words in the email because that was the quickest way to get out to the out to the out to the clients.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: But it shows that we were always thinking about what situation was, how do we speak to our clients?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: And Bailey Gifford had a very good performance during the pandemic.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And when markets changed, the style of investing changed after 2021, we suffered a dip in performance.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: But because we put in place this way we could communicate with people, we kept that going.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: Our managers didn't hide, so we continue to run the webinars.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: We started to do more quarterly update videos for our key funds and strategies, not just in the UK, but something we look at globally as well.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: And for end investors, we run annual webinars across all our investment trusts and some of our keycs as well, giving them the opportunity not just to hear from the manager but to ask them questions live.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, our sales team are out speaking to clients.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a good in-person events program as well.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, communication is very important.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if you communicate with clients and times are poor, you'll get the benefits from when performance improves.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: That visibility and that sort of explaining your way through those challenging periods is really binding, I think, with a you know, for relationships and that sort of, as I say, the trust to build.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I was thinking all of those tools and programs of communication and activities that you talk about have no doubt come into play considerably.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: You talked about the investment trust industry, and you have very much led the fight against the activist Sabah.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so maybe we can kind of circle back to that.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I'm very aware that you have used every tool in the toolkit for marketers to be able to kind of really address the situation, communicate with investors, and as I say, kind of lead that fight.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe you could give a bit of an overview as to what that situation is and again, kind of all those activities that you've had to sort of lean on in order to address the situation.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, of course.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, all I wanted for Christmas last year was to cancel my holidays to run another marketing campaign because Sabah were lodging votes against some of the investment trusts managed by Bailey Gifford's.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, for those that don't know, Sabah's a US activist investor.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: And for a few years been building stakes in many different investment trusts.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that includes, at the time, investment trust managed by Bailey Gifford's.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Three investment trusts are US Growth Trust, EnREC Worldwide, and Keystone Positive Change.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: So at the end of 2024, Sabah first announced their intention because of the size of the shareholding they have.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: They had a large enough shareholding to call a general meeting in some of those trusts where their proposal was to vote off the existing directors and elect directors that they have nominated.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: And effectively that would give Sabah control of those investment trusts and to run them to the mandate that they were wanting to pursue.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, investment trusts are our clients, they're run by their own board of directors.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And our brief was to engage with shareholders to get them to come out and to vote in favour of the board at these general meetings.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this took place at the start of 2025.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: There was seven trusts, the Magnificent Seven, or I think Sabah gave them other names.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: And for each meeting, Sabah were comprehensively defeated.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it was it was it was fantastic to see the engagement and the way that industry and people came together to uh to sort of uh campaign against Sabah.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: But that was just one vote, and unfortunately the situation hasn't necessarily changed.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: So for ENBOR worldwide, at the end of 2025, Sabah holds approximately 30% of the shares.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: And they called another general meeting essentially the same proposition.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Vote off the existing directors, vote on some new directors.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now the difficulty is for engaging people you can engage them once, but you've got to engage them again and again.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: And between the vote for Enver Worldwide at the start of 2025 and the vote that's going to happen at the start of 2026, Sava had increased their shareholding.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now, with these investment trusts, we've been very successful in our marketing over years, and we've got more individual investors holding shares on those investment trusts.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the diversification of shareholder bases has been good.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: More and more people hold investment trusts in platforms such as Hargage Lansdown, Interact Investor, AG Bell.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: But the difficulty with that is with SABA holding 30% of the vote, you then need to engage enough shareholders so that 30% plus one vote against Sabah.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it becomes a challenging situation when you look at the mathematics.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I look back at the data in 2025.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Investor trust AGMs don't get many people voting at them.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: We got turnouts in the votes in 2025 that were in excess of some general elections.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: And general elections are on the screens everywhere.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, everyone sees how much campaigning takes place, part of the people broadcasts.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: So our task was to get people to come out and vote in greater numbers in a general election.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that shouldn't be undomestic how difficult it was.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: The good thing was for us at the end of 2025 is we had experience of what we done at the start of the year.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially we had the playbook.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: We knew what we needed to do.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Timing was deliberately done by Sabah, so it worked against us.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: It took place over Christmas.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Christmas is obviously a more difficult time.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Timescales can get pushed out.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: There's public holidays, people have holidays as well.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: But the one thing at Bailey Gifford I know is that we've got a great team here.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: People know how to get work done, they know how to pull together.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: And because we'd run the Saba campaigns before, we knew exactly what we were looking to do, and we knew the timescales to get that done.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the moment the vote was essentially called, we put our plan into place.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now, some of the key mechanisms of reaching shareholders is that we are enabled to use something called Section 793 mailing, which enabled us to write out to each of the individual shareholders on platforms such as Hargrease and Interactive Investor.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Coordinated mailing at short notice is quite difficult, but we knew within timescales if we could get the mailing all prepared and planned before Christmas, we could get that posted out literally on the 2nd of January.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: We had to think about shareholders when they were going to more likely respond to a mailing.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: If something lands between Christmas and New Year, it might get not lost in the post, but lost in everything that was happening.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we felt that having something landing at the start of the year, telling people how to vote was going to work very well.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, we didn't just uh rely on the mailing.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: We had a lot of email communications, the database of names of people who knew for Edinburgh Worldwide.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: We're very fortunate that the chair of Edinburgh Worldwide produced content for us.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: He went into studios like we are today and shot videos.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: We also ran marketing campaign.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: We know from our research, we know from experience where investment trust investors go, what type of sites they go to consume content, what type of sites they go to do their research.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: So we worked with those sites, whether through display advertising or whether through advertising as well.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: We worked with each of the key sites to make sure that we had content in those places so people would see that.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: And by careful planning and by people coming together to turn things around very quickly, we made sure that everything happened almost in advance of when we planned.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's great to see the response that you get from teams internally and externally when you're trying to do a piece of work like this.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, it's not focusing everything in Sabah.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: We can't drop the ball elsewhere because especially in the teams at Billy Gifford, we've got responsibilities not just in the UK, but globally across many different types of clients.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we have to keep levels of service going.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: I guess one of the pleasing things about something like these votes is in marketing, you don't always see the outcomes of what you do.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: You have to wait months or even years to see the effectiveness of campaigns to see an increase in branding.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: With these votes at the general meetings for investment trusts, you see the results within a few weeks.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's binary.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: The votes are either they're won or lost.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: And in this case of Enra Worldwide, there was an increased turnout, but SABA, where again, motions were defeated.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: The existing board of ENRA Worldwide continued.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: As they're our clients, they're the board, they gave us a brief to run this campaign, so we go away and we did that.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: But it's incredibly pleasing to see what happened with this campaign and the end outcome.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Ian, it's phenomenal hearing you talk through all of that.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I know congratulations isn't really the word because Zab will likely come again, and you'll have to continue to defeat them in the next iteration of this.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess you can't really underestimate that effort, that achievement, and all that the sort of integrated nature of your sort of marketing has managed to deliver.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: So congratulations around all of that.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I just wonder whether there's a bit of a halo effect, you know, within Bailey Gifford of the strategic power or perception of marketing now with the C-suite.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it was always well understood, but I I don't know that it is across the investment industry or is that how much of a strategic lever marketing can be.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I just uh I kind of wondered, you know, how, given the kind of forward role of marketing in this fight, and particularly such visible campaigning, do you do you feel like it's gonna move the lever in terms of how marketing's perceived?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it was happening anyway.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: With Sabah, if we hadn't done the marketing in comms, the votes, you know, the boards wouldn't have won the votes.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um there would have been a different outcome.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: So in that respect, it shows that in that type of situation, you do need to have marketing.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I think within Bailey Gifford's and many other companies, we're seeing the change in the client base, we're seeing the move into more intermediated markets, we're seeing a position where brands is much more important than it was before.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's reflecting the change in Bailey Gifford's business.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: We've, as many people might have seen, we've run a brand campaign called Actual Investors since about 2018.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's actually a global campaign.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: So that's our global branding campaign we've been running for seven, eight years now.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the focus on that is building up Bailey Gifford's brand awareness in markets where Bailey Gifford's business is looking to grow and develop.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: In markets where it's not just about having those one-to-one relationships, it's markets where you have that brand awareness.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because instead of dealing one-to-one, you're dealing one-to-many.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now, an example of where this is becoming far and more important for us is that last year we announced plans to launch five active ETFs in the US.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: So to go alongside that, we've now got a New York-based marketing director.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got people working on Bailey Gifford marketing, not just in the UK, but working globally.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: We've also now got an International Marketing Manager who's based in London, covering essentially Europe, Asia, and most of the rest of the world.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: Bailey Gifford realizes, we realise that if we're moving into that kind of space, marketing becomes more important with that, not just running the brand campaigns, but everything from building up the email databases, sending out the emails, pushing out content in front of the right people at the right time.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where marketing role in the business starts to expand and develop.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you've seen that just as a gradual process.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: And in the UK, SABA's just one example of that.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I think going back to the UK, the change in the shareholder base of investment trust roles, a role that marketing has to play in moving away from institutional and wealth manager buyers more to individual buyers as well.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe just sort of zooming back out of the sort of investment trust industry, you know, it sounds like there's a lot going on.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: You talk about the US, you talk about the sort of the rolling brand positioning around actual investors.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: I guess maybe you could could you give us a bit more of a feel for kind of what's on the kind of priority list over the next 12 months or so and kind of what's on your to-do list.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot on that to-do list.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: But in terms of the biggest priority, and it's almost a cliched answer because I suspect many people will say that.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I think for me, one of the biggest priorities of the next 12 months outside the day-to-day thing, and my day-to-day thing is is quite big.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's all about AI.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not the first to say it, I'm not the last to say it.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: But the impact this is going to have across the business, across marketing, is going to be huge.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think we can underestimate that.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now, we're very fortunate.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: Bailey Gifford is embracing this.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're being given the tools to go and to use AI to see how we can integrate it within our roles.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's something that we're really pushing as a team.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it's all about looking at individual use cases of what we're using AI for.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not just about planning our holidays, it's not just doing about translation or can we help do subject lines for an email.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's trying to think how we can use AI to make a real difference.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, example I will give is where I'm using it, is that we're fortunate enough to have access to lots of different research, lots of industry research, lots of information out there.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Collating all that together is very difficult.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, one of the goals that we have, especially working for investment trust boards, is how to segment our audience, how to define our target audience in the UK and segment that, and the focus being the individual lend investor with investment trusts, especially seeing a change, you're looking for how do you market to each of these different segments?
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: How do these segments differ?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: How do they differ in their attitudes?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: How do they consume content differently, even just you know, basic things such as age and platforms they invest in and all that information is there, we've got access to all, but the difficulty of trying to pull all that together is huge.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: You end up basically with a massive paper making lots of notes.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: You could produce something, and we have done in the past, but it's a static position, it doesn't change.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Using AI brings all that together, and then the I tool can help us create custom segments and not just the segments with personas behind that.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not just a static one-use case.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Every time we can access new information, we can rerun it.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Or we could even rerun it across specific scenarios.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now that then gives us something to say, here's our target audience, here's what we know about them.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we can use that ourselves when we're planning and marketing campaigns, we can use it when we're briefing media plans, we can use it when we're briefing agencies as well.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: We can use it in reporting back to our clients to say, this is what we know about the investor market.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's just one use.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I could speak about that for quite a long time.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I know within the team, we're thinking of lots of other uses.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the challenge over the next 12 months is to think about bringing those uses to life and to see how we can make a difference within our marketing.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: And even just thinking about the mass of data that we have within marketing campaigns, all the different data points that we have is actually using AI to help bring those together in a more structured way and producing reports and information that can help with our decision making and you know, especially in the allocation of budget and effectiveness of that.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's gonna be a real powerful driver of engagement and effectiveness.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And do you think does this roll into my standard question in these conversations around what does success look like for marketing and financial services?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Does that sort of start to kind of flow through and be related there?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is always a question.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know yourself from the investment trust boards.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: When you get this question, it's the one that you don't like because you can't give the definitive answer.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: You'd love to say success is we've run a marketing campaign and it's equated to this amount of new investment or retention, but you we don't have the data to do that.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: So it's impossible to say this has done this and it's done that.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I think you have to measure success in different ways.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in one way, success is partly down to the acceptance of marketing, the role it has to play.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Sabat highlighted that marketing made a difference, and therefore, actually, you can see success there because people realise marketing's got a role to play, and suddenly marketing becomes much more important to the business itself.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: In other ways, we can look at it is not just soft measures, but we know I've got harder measures in place, obviously.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we look at success of Bailey Gifford as a brand, how is the band placed in different markets and different audiences?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: And by taking part in different surveys year and year, you can see the differences within that.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: We also look at uh other measures, you know, how do our communications rank?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then obviously on top of that as well, when you run a campaign, you've got all the measures of success, whether it's looking at emails and open links or click-throughs, or how's a piece of content performed, where we can, we try and look at benchmarks, whether it's benchmarks against the industry or just our own benchmarks as well.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, by pulling all these together, we try and see is marketing being successful.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: But as my answer has shown, there's not one strict definition of success, and it's hard to give a definitive answer.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is, and it slightly depends on the sort of stakeholder you're demonstrating success to, doesn't it, in terms of kind of what that might be.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe just to help wrap us up in, I feel like we must have done uh at least 20 minutes.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe as always, as it's become sort of common in these podcasts, you could just give any final tips for those who are building their careers and listening to this podcast and and thinking what are the kind of key things to take away for them?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and yeah, um I could probably talk about marketing all day.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: So 20 minutes is just a brief snapshot into what we do.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think with marketing itself, especially working financial services or in my case directly investment trusts in OICS, most of the time is it we can be quite insular.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we look at what our competitors are doing.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's more important, especially in a changing marketplace, dealing with wider audiences, dealing in areas that you never thought we'd be part of ten years ago, you know, doing TV advertising, running campaigns and social channels, is not to be so insular, is to look much broader than your own field and see what other people are doing.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: So look at the wider markets, look at what the big brands are doing, look at what other brands are doing across social media, and not just think about what's happening in the investment world, because what other people are doing may not come to us straight away, but it's probably something that we're going to be looking at or thinking about in a few months or you know, a couple of years' time.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: An inspiring finish to this conversation.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much, Ian.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's been lovely talking to you and hearing you really walk through so many of these distinct areas.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you again for your time and insight.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.