Invisible Brand

Lucian Camp casts a weary eye over the long drawn-out demise of the personal finance sections and makes the case for something fresher.

Reliable figures are hard to find, but they say that about one in ten readers of mid-market and what used to be called broadsheet newspapers pays attention to the Personal Finance sections.

I don’t know about you, but I’m amazed it’s not far fewer. There may be a few duller things printed – I have a booklet beside me as I write, for example, detailing the terms of the guarantee on my Epson printer in sixteen European languages – but there aren’t many. Check them out if you don’t believe me. Personal Finance sections today are thin, editorially moribund places, sparsely populated with grim little advertisements for term assurance from desperate direct providers, and for saving and borrowing products from big banks and building societies whose agencies put all their energies into making the TV commercials and leave the clients and a bloke in the studio to bolt together the press ads.

A heady time
It wasn’t always like this. Personal Finance sections have never been known for their taste, quality or imagination, but back in the bull market of the 90s they could be fairly exciting places to be.

A bit like covered markets in provincial French towns, they may have been a bit rough and ready and tatty round the edges, but they were places where
large numbers of confident investors wanting to bung money into flavour-of-the-month funds would mill enthusiastically around, while the providers would pile the said flavour-of-the-month funds high on their stalls (or rather in their ads) and describe their past and potential future performance in excited terms unaffected by the need to Treat Customers Fairly.

After the party
Then of course there was the great crash, and the flavour-of-the-month funds took on a strangely bitter taste, and that group of confident direct investors melted away like snowflakes in a blast furnace, and that lively, bustling marketplace became a very sad and quiet place indeed.

So much so that if you wanted to draw a retailing analogy these days, you wouldn’t look towards the covered markets of Cahors and Angoulême, but more likely to the department stores of Moscow and East Berlin at the height of the Cold War – big buildings that look pretty much like department stores, but where there are strangely few customers and nothing much to buy except pickled turnips and some ugly pink zip fasteners from a factory in Katowice.

The more you think about this, the more apparent it becomes that the current state of affairs reflects a good deal of woefully complacent and unimaginative management of their editorial assets on the part of the newspaper publishers.

Adjusting to reality
For some reason, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of them that the vibrant marketplace of the 90s isn’t coming back. (Even in the unlikely event that the investors regained their enthusiasm for buying off the page, the manufacturers aren’t interested in them any more and the FSA won’t have it). And, much more important, it hasn’t occurred to any of them that many financial advertisers, and their agencies, would be very pleased indeed if a new kind of broadly ‘financial’ editorial would start to emerge.

What we want is something very different. We want ‘sections’ (not necessarily newspaper sections – maybe sections very much more like the Sunday Times’ Style magazine, or the Observer’s monthly food, sport and music magazines) – that don’t just target the hardcore hobbyists but try to engage and involve a much bigger and wider proportion of the papers’ readerships.

We want editorial that’s interesting and involving, dealing with financial issues that connect directly with the way people lead their lives, not just reprinting press releases about investment funds. Money is not an isolated and separate part of our lives: it connects directly, importantly and emotionally with our work, our relationships, our families, our hopes and aspirations, our plans for the future. We need editorial that explores this ‘big’ financial agenda, not just the micro-agenda of products and percentages.

And then, with the right editorial, we need a high-quality environment where we can run decent ads that are intended, at least in part, to build our clients’ brands.

Situation vacant
It’s extraordinary that in an advertising sector as big as financial services, there should be such an enormous gap in the media options available. There really are very few places to go for organisations which believe they can’t afford television, but want to build their brands in the minds of intelligent and reasonably affluent people. Outdoor is too wasteful, radio is too downmarket, specialist financial magazines are too niche, specialist non-financial magazines don’t really provide the right environment, and brand-building on the Internet is still in its infancy. You can of course advertise in non-financial sections of the quality press, just as car manufacturers advertise outside the motoring sections. But it would be better – much better – if you could reach people in an environment where, by definition, they were ready to engage with financial issues.

A brand-friendly environment
The need is very urgent. Everyone in financial services agrees that in principle, we’re in a period in which the advertising tide is flowing away from product, and towards brand – ultimately for the simple reason that brand is one of the few sustainable marketing assets available in a world of convergence and commoditisation.

For all its faults, the British newspaper industry isn’t usually slow to evolve or to innovate – especially when it comes to finding new ways to part advertisers from their money. Yet somehow the Personal Finance sections stagger on from month to month, unchanged. It’s so odd that I can think of only one explanation.

They’re so dull that the papers’ editors, publishers and proprietors are among the nine out of ten readers who never even give them a second glance.