Episode Overview

In this episode of The Future-Ready Advisor, host Sam Sivarajan sits down with Charlie Grinnell, co-founder and CEO of Right Metric, for a masterclass in digital marketing and customer acquisition. Charlie shares insights from his time as global head of social at Red Bull and reveals how disruptors like Chime and Wealthsimple are outpacing traditional banks by understanding the attention economy.

They discuss why financial institutions need to think long-term about marketing investments, how to compete for attention in a digitally native world, and practical strategies for reaching younger clients where they actually spend their time. Whether you're struggling with attribution, looking to attract Gen Z and millennial clients, or wondering how to market like a media company, this conversation delivers actionable strategies to transform your approach.

Key Quote

"Don't listen to what people say, watch what they do. Everybody lies." --- Charlie Grinnell

Key Takeaways

•     Red Bull's marketing success comes from treating attention as the ultimate currency and playing the long game.

•     Chime has more customers than Canada's biggest bank after just 10 years---showing the power of digital-first strategies.

•     Financial services preach long-term to clients but operate on short-term quarterly metrics---a fundamental disconnect.

•     Fish where the fish are---meet your target audience on their platforms, speaking their language authentically.

•     Insights without action are worthless---always ask "how can I act on this today?" and start small with testing.

Sound Bites

•     "Red Bull understood the value of attention way before everyone else did."

•     "Whether you buy the product or not, you're going to spend time with our brand."

•     "Chime is 10 years old and already has more customers than the biggest bank in Canada."

•     "Financial marketers don't look externally, which I think is a huge problem."

•     "You can't be the adult coming into the room saying 'hello, fellow kids.'"

Topics Discussed

•     01:08 -- From Red Bull to Right Metric: Understanding the Attention Economy

•     06:20 -- The Long-Term vs. Short-Term Paradox in Financial Services

•     15:45 -- Why Chime and Wealthsimple Are Winning Against Traditional Banks

•     36:02 -- Creating Authentic Content for Gen Z and Millennial Clients

•     56:24 -- Rapid-Fire Round: Fish Where the Fish Are & Actionable Insights

Resources Mentioned

•     Learn more about Charlie Grinnell: LinkedIn Profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/charliegrinnell/) or visit connectwithcharlie.ca

•     Explore Right Metric's resources: rightmetric.co

Stay Connected with The Future-Ready Advisor

•     Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform to never miss an episode.

•     Join the conversation on LinkedIn---share your thoughts and connect with other forward-thinking advisors.

•     Explore more insights on Sam's website or theuncertaintyedge.com

Hi everyone. I'm Sam Sivarajan and welcome to today's episode of the Future Ready Advisor. Today, I'm joined by Charlie Grinnell, co-founder and CEO of Right Metric, a company that helps major consumer brands understand digital behavior signals to optimize their marketing strategies. Charlie brings a unique perspective from his years at Red Bull, where he served as global head of social for all sports.

and his work with major financial institutions like Interac, ATB Financial, and Alliance Bernstein. His company sits on massive amounts of digital data, allowing them to spot the earthquakes in industries, including financial services, before traditional competitors even know what's happening. Charlie's insights into how brands like Chime and Wealthsimple are disrupting traditional financial institutions

offer valuable lessons for advisors looking to compete in an attention driven economy. Charlie, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Sam. It's great to be here.

great to have you and I'm interested to talk about Red Bull. I'm interested to talk about digital marketing. think it is so timely with all of the things that we're seeing and reading and hearing about AI and digital marketing and the fact that people's attention span is less than that of a goldfish these days. I think that there's a lot that you can shed light on for our audience.

Yeah.

So maybe we can start. Your journey spans from Red Bull's global marketing machine, and I think anyone that knows anything about Red Bull knows how strong they are in that sphere of things, to founding Right Metric. You told me earlier that at Red Bull, you had an unlimited budget to do cool stuff on the internet.

Can you walk us through how your experience at Red Bull shaped your understanding of how brands compete for attention and how that applies to financial services in today's world?

Yeah, really good question. And I think that, you know, I say that kind of like unlimited budget, you know, tongue in cheek, we were able to do some really cool things there. I was just so fortunate to be able to work at a brand like Red Bull. I think that first and foremost, it taught me a different way of thinking.

Right. And so I think that this kind of like traditional marketing, you know, marketing funnel, et cetera. that's, know, the way that many organizations and marketers themselves think about marketing. And I think when I got to Red Bull, I was just so fortunate to learn from so many smart people around me and the DNA of the company was so different in a way, that wasn't.

sales focused, it was marketing focused, right? So everyone talks about Red Bull being a marketing company that happens to sell an energy drink. and really what I think that actually means is Red Bull was super, super early in understanding the value of attention. And they primarily did that through content marketing. And that's where this phrase market like a media company, I think kind of comes from, right? We've kind of heard this throughout, you know, we need to market more like a media company. And so

Thank

What Red Bull did a really good job of was understanding whether you buy the product, know, the energy drink or not, you are going to spend time with our brand and you're going to consume the content. You know, you're going to follow us on social because the content is going to be so good. You're going to come to redbull.com and spend time on our website because we'll have deeper content where you can kind of go down a rabbit hole in your living room. You can throw up on your TV, Red Bull TV and watch, you know, long form live stream stuff. And so like the whole thing was

Mm.

whether you buy the product or not, you are going to spend time with our brand. so I think that, you know, it's this marketing from an attribution perspective has always been like, what's the thing that caused people to buy the, you know, what's the attribution at the end of the day? We ran this ad and they came and they bought this. And I think with what Red Bull was doing, which was really smart was they've just taken a super long-term view. said, anytime someone comes into contact with our brand, they're going to have a good experience. And you know what? That means that probably they're not going to buy a lot of the time, but

Mm-hmm.

when they're in the right mindset and when they're ready for that product, whether it's an energy drink, they will hopefully choose us, right? Now, some people would say that's kind of like a prayer. You're just throwing it up and like, hope it works. But I think, you know, their business is continuing to grow. Obviously they're not public, but you can see that their business is continuing to grow and they're...

Right.

You know, they've kind of become the de facto of they're in every single space and they're able to command this amount of attention. And so I think the way that they have done that was understanding there's only so many, there's only 24 hours in a day. Every human only has two eyeballs and one brain. And so when we think about like supply and demand, they're going, how can we occupy as much of that as possible? And what do we as Red Bull need to do to earn that attention?

That's an interesting point. And I think you're right that the idea of grabbing that attention space and playing the long game to see when and if it converts is a strategy. as you say, it obviously seems like it's working for Red Bull. I think when you are into the financial space where there are in many cases, public companies where it is or

private equity owned companies, et cetera, where there are quarterly demands and quarterly metrics that you need to meet. How does that insight translate into somebody with the financial lens, if you will, to say, can you convert or how do you maximize conversion? Or more importantly, because I've heard this many times from people is how can you...

Yeah.

Yep.

And I think attribution is the way you put it. How can you attribute this money and the effort that you're spending over here on that attention building to say that that has translated over a month, over six months, over two years into actually increased sales?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I think there's a few things that we really need to point out. And I think you called one out, right? Where when you kind of have this private equity or public, you know, owned, owned businesses, they are for shareholders. They are responsible to show what is happening quarterly. That is short-term. And I think what's really interesting though, is when we actually take a step back, financial services, their whole, their whole business, everything they talk about is long-term.

Mm-hmm.

Invest with us for the long term, set up for your retirement, do your 30 year mortgage with us, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I always find that kind of juxtaposition of those two things hilarious because on one hand they preach long-term, but then on the other hand, the operators, the executives running the organization are kind of having their feet held to the fire, so to speak, from a short-term perspective.

Correct.

Right.

And so I think what's like, like, and I don't necessarily have the answer, but what I think is really, really important here to understand is much like big banks are willing to spend a ton of money to earn a customer upfront because they know they're statistically going to stay for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Why do we not think about that from a marketing investment perspective?

Why do we think about it in this like quarterly? have you done for me lately? Now I'm not saying we should dismiss that and get rid of the, have you done for me lately? Because you do need to measure as you go, you know, weekly, monthly, quarterly, et cetera. But I think there is kind of this funny dilemma here from a, an incentive perspective and an action perspective. So what I think from a marketing perspective is you need to have these longer term things going on and you need to take a longer term view.

Mm-hmm.

because that is where the power of things come from. If we go back to Red Bull, Red Bull was marketing like a media company in 2008. Today, everyone goes, my gosh, look at all the stuff that Red Bull has done. They made a huge bet a long, long time ago in spending a ton of cash and building that infrastructure so that they have this media machine. Now, that was the foresight of the owner, founder, executive leadership team, et cetera. the amount of, they made a bet saying, hey, this attention thing is gonna be worth it. And so we're gonna spend a disproportionate amount of money

Hmm.

on marketing and specifically marketing in this way that isn't like, Hey, by now and now fast forward, everyone goes, my gosh, that's amazing. Right. And I think about it, like, you know, it's the same thing with, with saving and investing. compound interest. like, it's so awesome. You have this now. It's like, well, yeah, look at all these investments that were made over time. So I see a lot of parallels there. I think what needs to happen from a marketing perspective is you need both long-term and short-term activities from a marketing perspective.

And you need to be able to effectively communicate those to the rest of the business. think this is oftentimes something where marketing falls down. Marketing is really good at speaking marketing, but they're not very good at speaking business. And marketing needs to get better at translating marketing activities into marketing metrics, and then taking those marketing metrics and translating them into business metrics. That's where I think that needs to happen. And you need to have this kind of framework of here's the stuff we're going to do to drive growth this month, this quarter, this year. And here's the stuff we're doing. That's, this is a bet.

for the next five years so that people spend time with us and you need to do both.

I like that. And I think you're absolutely right. think that translating into business metrics, I think is sound advice. And as you were talking about the parallels between that marketing mindset and that investment mindset, it brought to me the old story that we all know and every advisor listening to this podcast knows that the classic overnight success story, the 20 year overnight success story, right? And that's exactly what you're talking about.

Totally. Yep.

Red Bull has done and I think it's a really good reminder that we are evaluating Red Bull's success today based on decisions that they made 20 years ago and have consistently followed through on so that the you're not going to get immediate gratification from these decisions. I think you have to have well thought out strategy but having thought it out you have to have the courage of your convictions to try to persist.

for a period of time at least to let the impact occur and not try to look for immediate results.

Absolutely. And I think it's a balance, right? Or maybe balance is the wrong word. It's an integration, right? Because you might not have balance. are going to be some, you know, the market is in a different place, so you're going to be different kind of things. But I think that you need to have both that short-term and long-term approach going at the same time. And I think one of the things that we see this more broadly across different sectors, but I think it's relevant in financial as well, is with the rise of

digital metrics and specifically e-commerce, think marketing has unfairly been pulled into sales. So what I mean by that is when we think about, let's say you want to buy this phone online, you go to the website, you, know, I saw an ad, I go to the website. I, I like it. I select it. I add it to my cart. I check out. Boom. We now have that like attribution. Charlie came here. He clicked this ad. He bought this phone off. goes now, which of that is marketing and which of that is sales. And oftentimes

Mm-hmm.

you

Right.

there are like marketing is marketing. Marketing's job is to keep people ready and warm until they're ready to buy. Right? Sales is actually going in and converting them. And I think oftentimes organizations get really confused about the purpose of marketing and the purpose of sales. And those lines have been blurred because of digital because it's like, where is that kind of line in the sand? But I think about it with with what we did at Red Bull. And we look at this across sectors of brands that have done a really great job. Well, simple is a great example of this.

Hmm.

They did a really good job of marketing, not selling and marketing is how can they earn someone's attention and provide value? And when I say value, entertainment value, educational value, informational value over an extended period of time so that they can win mind share so that when someone is thinking about who to choose, they choose well simple. Red Bull did the same thing. Whether or not you're in it, you're not in a convenience, you know, it's not every time you're on Instagram, buy a Red Bull, buy a Red Bull, buy a Red Bull. It's, F1.

Right.

here's someone jumping out of a plane. here's this mountain biker. here's this. And over time, they're just getting exposed to it so that hopefully when they walk into a seven 11 or a convenience store and they need a boost, they're going to go to the fridge and grab a Red Bull. That's what they're betting on, but that's marketing. That's not sales. Now Red Bull has a full sales organization that they, they do their things, but I think it's really, really important to point out the difference between marketing and sales. And I think oftentimes a lot of organizations get that confused.

Thank

No, it's a great reminder. And you talked about wealth simple, and I want to come to that in a second. But before we do that, I want to talk about a US example. When we talked, you showed me that your data shows that Chime, which is a neo bank in the US, has 22 million customers compared to the largest bank in Canada, which has 17 million, despite Chime being only founded in 2015.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, obviously the U.S. market is 10 times bigger and everything else, but it's still eye-opening data that you presented. And when you told me that you presented this to 400 financial professionals in Toronto, most of them had never heard of Chime, which again, not surprising to, I've only recently heard of it. I didn't hear about it five years ago, for example. But what does this blind spot

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yep.

In your view, tell us about the industry's awareness of the disruption that is taking place.

Yeah, I was shocked is how I would put it. And, know, my background hasn't been in financial services until I started this company and we start, we do a lot of work in financial services now. And yeah, so what happened was I walked on stage and we did this full tear down into Chime and we can, you know, we can link it in the show notes here for people to download and take a look. But basically I walked on stage and I said, okay, we're going to talk about Chime. Quick show of hands here.

who has heard of Chime? Because I wanted to kind of understand who was in the room. And I think like 10 hands went up. And I figured like most hands would go up like, yeah, we've heard of Chime, know, whatever. And I was kind of unprepared. I didn't really know. I didn't expect people not to see that, to have heard of it, even if it is in the US. So that was like a really, really surprising thing for me. I think, you know, what does that blind spot tell us? That blind spot tells me that financial marketers

don't look externally, which I think is a huge problem and challenge. And I think regulation is often used as a crutch, which we'll kind of maybe get into in a second. But I think there were a whole bunch of key learnings and the kind of the key takeaways there wasn't, Hey, go copy chime. The learning was this, this company is 10 years old and is already bigger, has more customers than the biggest bank in Canada. Now I'm not saying that their business is bigger. I'm not saying that the big banks are going to die.

Mm-hmm.

But I'm saying, what did they do in a decade to grow their customer base that we as financial services marketers can learn from? That was the key takeaway, right? And there was a whole bunch of things that we could learn from. Now, why I bring up that regulation point is I think a lot of people would kind of sit back and be like, you know, it's the U S different regulations, et cetera, et cetera. Totally fine. Yes, there is regulation.

can learn from. Right.

I think the question and our task as marketers is yes, there's regulation, but how can we use our brain, the matter in between our ears to be creative and comply with regulations, but also earn people's attention. And more specifically, I think what's really interesting about Chime is Chime being this neo bank. They are masters at marketing to that really important kind of like late teen segment where people are starting to choose a bank.

And you know, once they choose a bank, it's really going to be difficult for them to switch in the future, they might not want to. So I would argue that it's really, really important for financial services brands to get this right and become the best pound for pound marketer for people in their late teens, because if they can win them there, there's a really good chance the customer lifetime value of those people goes really, really long. So I think what was interesting is when we tore down their strategy, we're seeing what are they doing from a messaging perspective? What are they doing from a content perspective?

How does that differ from their advertising strategy? And this was actually a really interesting, their organic social media, what they're posting on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube was very almost like Buzzfeed like trendy. And then their advertising stuff is very like traditional financial institution. Here's this credit card, here's the benefit, like product benefit, et cetera. That juxtaposition was so smart because they're going, hey,

we're not going to be able to like post a photo of our credit card organically and like off it goes. But if we work with this creator, this influencer to create a really cool thing that is an entertaining piece of content, maybe people will follow us or maybe they'll come to our website. And then what they'll do is they'll, once they've come to the site and they've been able to cookie them, they run an ad to them that actually is more like product focused, right? And more conversion focused. I think there's so much there for big banks just to learn from that tactic. How can you actually

be more editorial with your content to get people to spend time with you. See, then, then target those people who actually signal that they're spending time with you and then target them with, Hey, have you ever thought about switching over here, et cetera, et cetera? So there's a whole bunch of, know, it's an 80 page deck of like, here's kind of what they're doing and what's working well and what's not. but our team just found it fascinating that, that not a lot of people in that audience had, had heard that.

And yeah, when we, you I had a landing page up there and I think I had like 350 downloads of the deck. So I think people found it useful, but I was just shocked in the beginning that people hadn't heard about that.

Well, it's an interesting point you make about this regulation as a crutch. It's true that financial services, especially in the investment or insurance world, is highly regulated. But I think you make a really good point that the US might be a less regulated market in many ways than Canada.

But Chime is competing with other credit card issuers in the US, et cetera, who are facing the same level of types of regulation that Chime is. And they're not doing the playbook, if you will, of what Chime is doing. And so I think to your point, you're not saying that ignore regulations, et cetera. What you're saying is take the lessons.

Absolutely.

that a chime has done or other upstarts in Canada, like a wealth simple or a quest rate or somebody else has done and say, how can you take those lessons and not copy them in your traditional firm or et cetera, but what lessons can you learn that you can apply or tweak to your own approach to marketing to target this?

Yeah.

the key segments that you are interested in targeting from an attention point of view for that lifetime value that you talked about.

Absolutely. And I think, you know, the key thing also to pull out is most marketers listening to this probably agree. It's just, they need to take that up the chain and the fish stinks from the head down. Right? So I understand that senior leadership might be like, no, we can't do this. But this is why I think it's really, really important that marketing gets good at speaking business and that marketing takes this information to the business.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So why that chime example is so great is literally take that and walk it up the chain to go, Hey, do you know this is happening? Like you need to show it and prove the case. Right now everyone's going to have objections to different things. But I think like that is the piece is you're not just going to be able to do this from a marketing perspective. You're probably going to need this more kind of like C-suite buy-in and that's fine. But that's our job as marketing to advocate and provide perspective.

for the leadership team to go, hey, here's what's happening in the market. And we as marketing are telling you, here's what's happening in the market. And here's some of the things that we think we need to do. Now, that could have some cross-functional implications, right? And there is gonna be probably some risk assessments, et cetera, et cetera. Like that's natural. But I think it's really, really important. Cause I go, how long have the big banks been around? 100 years? Chime's been around a 10th of the time and they're already bigger.

But I think to your point, risk assessment is incumbent on anything that we do. And I think what people forget is that the risk of not doing anything and losing market share to a new entrant is also a risk that needs to be assessed for any large organization.

Yeah.

Yep. Well, and I think with chimes specifically here too, right? Like most people sitting, if there were people sitting in that room going at, and it's an, it's a Neo bank, you know, they're kicking back being like, yeah, there's probably a bunch of, you know, millennials or Gen Z who are kind of just using this day to day. What happens if we fast forward a decade, right? All of a sudden those like, maybe customers that aren't as, aren't as valuable necessarily today are super valuable and they're sticky now. They're not going to change. Right. And you know what?

Correct.

very, very similar to how big banks thought about Wealthsimple. Which I know we're gonna get into in a little bit, but like, yeah, sure.

Well, why don't we do that right now? mean, like, I think that's a great, I think it's a great point. And I think it's an opportunity. I'd like you to walk the audience through how you spotted Wealthsimples rise five years ago, why Canadian firms hadn't taken those early warning signs seriously until recently.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think in the process, maybe talk a little bit about what your company does and how it identified the earthquakes that were impacting the financial industry way back when.

Sure. So maybe I'll talk about the kind of like the Richter scale earthquake thing first, cause that'll set the stage. So when we started the company, our kind of thesis was the internet is continuing to eat the world. So what that means is we are going to do more and more things on these devices. And by doing more and more things on these devices, there's going to be more and more data points available that we can count and pull meaning from.

Mm-hmm.

Right. So pretty soon we are going to get to a point where it's like, buy a car online, we buy a house online, like whatever, right? These things were typically offline. So that's really, really interesting. So we started going, okay, these data sets are getting more and more valuable because we're doing more and more activities that we historically hadn't done on these devices. And so, yeah, you know, we were working in the financial services space. We had a few financial services customers and, and we were kind of looking around at like, okay.

you

Where are people spending time with financial services brands? Now there's the big kind of incumbents. There's, know, credit unions. There's all these kinds of different types of firms. And what we noticed was wealth simple was spending a disproportionate amount on marketing. Now, when I say spending a disproportionate amount on marketing, I mean a few things. Number one, they were spending a ton on ads. Okay, cool. We can see how much they're spending and where they're spending. But what they were also doing was we could see that their traffic was going up.

And when we started to dig into, how are they generating all this traffic? Is it advertising? Yes, that was one of them. But also we started to look at what were they building from a content perspective. And so they were building these like really, really long form detailed guides into things. And they were building, you know, mortgage calculators and all these kind of like tools that are pretty standard. they were, they were really, really starting to invest in that.

Mm-hmm.

So we did a whole bunch of teardowns five years ago into, know, Hey, here's how Wealthsimple did XYZ thing over the last 18 months. And this is five years ago. And we would bring this to our customers at the time to go, Hey, have you heard about this kind of Wealthsimple thing? Like, this is pretty interesting. And a lot of them would say something like this. Yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty interesting, but we're focused on this. And so they knew it was there.

But what we were saying was, Hey, this digital growth that's happening. We think that this digital growth will eventually turn into business growth because this is activity. This is people coming to their site over and over and over and over and over again. And if they're coming to the site over and over and over and over over again, they're either coming there for the content or they're coming there to, you know, use the product. So we kind of had any time we were talking to, different financial services,

Mm-hmm.

companies, we were bringing up well simple, hey, do you know about it? Hey, do you take it seriously? Do you view them as a competitor, all of that? And you know, it was kind of like brushed off. And the thing the thing that changed all of that was actually in end of 2024 was when they came out and talked about they announced that they were profitable.

All right.

And they announced that their revenue was up 88 % year over year. had 3 million customers and their assets on under management was 50 billion. All of a sudden within like a month, people that I was talking to in financial were like, we've spun up a task force to try and figure out what to do about Wealthsimple. And now most recently in August, 2025, they've doubled again. And now they're like 90 billion, almost 90 billion in assets under management.

And they're continuing to grow. And now you can't talk to someone in Canada in financial services who hasn't, you know, obviously heard of WellSimple. I think the key takeaway here is you can see this coming from digital metrics way before the business happened. So our kind of thesis of if they're spending money there and they're earning attention and people are spending time there and they're continuing to come back over and over again and they've built this machine, that is a signal.

And so we kind of pulled that signal in. And so it's been fascinating to watch now with WellSimple announcing their checking account and their credit card and kind of all that sort of stuff. But it's like everything was, it's been there for however many years. It's just a matter of if we want to take it seriously or not.

And I think to your point, I think you'd mentioned earlier that the, you know, maybe the brush off of, of Wealth Simple might've been that that's not the target client that we're looking for. It's the young millennial, et cetera. They're not really generating a lot of value for us, et cetera. And it sounds like Wealth Simple is now attracting very much many of those types of clients that are the dream clients of the, of the big banks, right?

Yep. Yeah. Well, and okay, I'm going to age myself here. I'm 35. Okay. So I'm technically that like not valuable millennial client right now in the grand scheme of things. You know, I don't have a million bucks sitting in my WellSimple account. There are a bunch of people with a million bucks sitting in their WellSimple account that have gone from traditional firms over there. However, might I remind everybody listening when my parents die and when my generation's parents die,

Mm-hmm.

Who's inheriting all of that? Us, right? So wouldn't it be valuable to get them in your ecosystem? Cause guess what? I have my $25,000 of savings sitting in WellSimple and my parents croak and I inherit 5 million bucks because their real estate has gone through the roof or whatever it is, where do think that money is gonna go? It's gonna go straight into WellSimple. Cause I'm not gonna switch my infrastructure all of a sudden because like my parents have died.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Right. So that's also kind of another thing as I go, like, these people are actually super, super valuable. It's just, again, that doesn't align with what are we doing this quarter? Right. And it goes back to that conversation of short term versus long term. So I don't know. It's interesting.

Well, right. Right. No, it is interesting. And I think the, the trade off is either paying a little bit of money now over a period of time to acquire these clients. or you pay probably a lot of money down the road to acquire them when they are, with a million dollars or $5 million or what have you. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And they're a lot harder to find, but I also go, there's probably a great business to be had in the short term by having those people. And I think that's why WellSimple has gone into checking account, credit card, et cetera. Cause they're like, when they think about their value ladder for their customers, yeah, they started in that, but they were like, how do we extend the ladder back so that people can actually spend time with us day to day? We can monetize that.

so that we can graduate them up the ladder to get into our kind of core business. I predict that their core business will probably become more and more broad by that, but they started by kind of wedging in in one thing and then backing out in a natural way that made sense for the behavior of their customer.

Well, let's talk about the behavior of your customer. I you and I chatted before, you mentioned, which I found very intriguing, that at Red Bull, you learned that you're not just competing with other energy drinks. You're actually competing with the likes of Netflix or Taylor Swift or anything else demanding consumer intention. Now that's a very interesting perspective. I hadn't thought about it that way, but it makes total sense.

Yeah.

How should financial advisors apply this kind of mindset when thinking about their own client engagement and retention strategies?

Yeah. So I think number one is acknowledging that that is the reality we live in. Right. So oftentimes, and I've again, financial services or other industries, we'll talk to a customer and we'll say, okay, like, who do you compete with? And they'll list off their business competitors, right? Their product competitors, et cetera. And we go, okay, cool. Who else do you compete with? And they're like, that's it. And you're like, not necessarily. What about this? What about this? What about this? And it goes back to what I said, right? 24 hours in a day.

Right.

and

Two eyes, one brain. Attention is scarce. Who do you compete with? So what we did at Red Bull that was, you know, yes, were we watching the competitors? Of course we were. We were watching, you know, other energy drink companies, but then we were also going, okay, who are we trying to reach and how do these people behave in the rest of their lives? So you brought up Taylor Swift or Netflix or, you know, Buzzfeed or, or, know, whatever. I think.

Mm-hmm.

this mindset shift that's required is understanding that yes, you are competing with the person selling the same product or service of you. Yes, that's a given. The sky is blue and the trees are green. However, you are also competing with the news cycle. You are also competing with Squid Game season three or, you know, new show season 10, whatever it is, right? You are competing with Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, whatever the biggest thing in the world is at the time.

Why I think, why I say it's important to accept that is, okay, then you'll start to understand and start to probably better scrutinize what you're doing and actually stress testing it to, is this actually worth Sam's attention? Is this actually worth Charlie's attention? Because Charlie's sitting there scrolling away on, you know, the latest meme or the latest whatever. And I think that raises the bar and the filter needed for what is value.

Okay.

And when I say what is value, know, look at our ad. It's so great. No, it's your shitty ad. That's actually what it is. It's like, get it for this, this amount of money. It's your, it's your crappy ad. And I think that it forces us as marketers, that mindset forces us as marketers to truly think is this, does this actually provide value? Would it stop someone from scrolling? Would it entice or encourage someone to want to spend time with our brand?

And so that fundamental mindset shift, I think is really, really important. So what is the advice to financial advisors? Get an understanding of who those people are that you were trying to reach and where they spend time. So in the case of let's say high net worth individuals, High net worth individuals. Oftentimes people go financial advisors that we've worked with are like, yeah, they're on LinkedIn, know, they're executives, et cetera, et cetera. Absolutely, they are. Where are they? Where else?

Cause they're not sitting on LinkedIn all day, every day. They're probably on Facebook. They're probably on Instagram. They're probably on YouTube. They're probably on Tik TOK. And what do they follow? Maybe they're into like road cycling. Maybe they watch tour de France. Maybe they're a car person, you know, they really like, or maybe they watch F1, right? These are all the things where it's like, yeah, that, that high net worth person. So how can we, as financial advisors show up in those areas in a way that's credible? That isn't like, Hey, by now, can I manage your money?

Mm-hmm.

Right? So it's that fine balance, but it starts with before you can figure out what to say, you need to figure out where they are. And then once you figure out where they are, you understand, okay, they're there. What are they doing? They're watching this thing. Okay. How can we, as our brand insert ourselves in a way that isn't please buy now, because that's instantly just going to turn them off. Right? So this is kind of the way to start to think about it. And it's a fundamental shift. It's, very, very different.

Well, it is a fundamental shift, but it isn't in some ways, uh, just the advisors that I know, uh, they spend a lot of time getting to know their clients, what their interests are. So whether it's road cycling or, um, you know, uh, car racing or what have you. And I think they do a really good job of, uh, engaging with the client on that basis. But then, you know, at that firm level or what have you, I think there's not that.

Yep.

Yep. Golf.

same kind of connect again, coming back to the themes that we've already talked about, regulation as a crutch or what have you, we've taken the traditional approach to marketing and continuing to apply it. And you make a really, really good point that mindset shift is critical to get people to start thinking you need to be relevant to your target clients.

where, when, and how they want to engage with you, not where you have decided that you want to engage with them.

Absolutely. And whether they're ready to buy or not, how can you show up and be around them and be in front of them without just only saying by now? That's, think a thing is like, it can't always be by now, by now, by now, by now, by now, right? That's that sales. That's not marketing. Marketing is actually, how do we, how do we keep that, that relationship open and, and, know, and, and ongoing and how do we have touch points that actually don't

All right.

sell anything other than selling the deepening of the relationship.

That's a very powerful point. Can you expand on that a bit? So the deepening the relationship is critical. And what are some best practices you've seen in other industries? This is a service, In financial services, I you've got a product, et cetera, but when you mean deepening, is it education? Is it information? Is it talking about trust?

I'll... I'll... Yeah. Yeah.

What do you mean by definitely?

Yes, and all of it, right? So I'll give a consumer example. So I spend a lot of time in the outdoors and then I'll translate this into financial services. So on the consumer side, I spend a lot of time in the outdoors. I mountain bike, I ski. And so I used to work in marketing at Arterics. so Arterics, when you buy a jacket from Arterics, it's an expensive investment. They're really great quality garments. But what they've done is such a great job of is...

Mm-hmm.

The content that they send you around that pre-purchase as well as post-purchase is, here's, know, layering is a big thing when you're buying a jacket. Here's our layering guide. Super detailed with a whole bunch of explainers around how to do stuff. okay, cool. If I'm buying this Gore-Tex jacket, I want to make sure, or here's how to clean it. Here's how to maintain it. Here's how you should be thinking about building your layering system. All of that, none of it was like, but here, make sure you check out. Buy now, make sure you check out. No, no, no.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

We are going to provide value and help you make a buying decision. But also whether you spend, you know, whether you buy or not, you're going to have a good experience. What they'll also do is put some athlete stories in there. So they'll say, Hey, by the way, you're looking at this climbing jacket. Here's this, or this ski jacket. Here's actually a cool story of one of our ski ambassadors doing some crazy trip. And it's like a full, it has nothing to do with buying the product.

Hmm.

But what you do is you're actually watching the product get used in some crazy thing, that aspirational thing. And so again, I might not check out and click buy from there, but I'm spending time with the brand. And over time, Arterics is just growing mind share, right? And then off we go. So I think about that when we translate that into financial services, right? To your point, advisors do this offline very well.

They go to the golf course. They, you know, they, they go to fundraisers. They, they do all of this stuff in person. I just think the shift that needs to happen is how can you actually recreate that stuff digitally? So is it, you know, we see some of this with webinars. We see some of this with, with these other things. but how can you, you know, we see it with newsletters. How can you do it in a way that's, that's really interesting and engaging and valuable. And I think that oftentimes it's usually been the kind of cut and paste like a webinar, right?

next.

A lot of the financial services webinars that I see are like pretty crappy, boring, stale, like not that interesting, not that approachable. you know, is there a way where it's like, Hey, you're, you're going to do a webinar, but you're going to bring in someone not from the financial services space to talk about something. So let's say, Hey, we know that, this audience is really interested in, in road cycling and they're based on the west coast of Canada. Hey, we're going to do a fireside chat with this road cyclist and we're going to throw an event.

Yeah.

People are going to just come spend time at the event. And all we're going to do is throw an event for our customers and prospects to come to. It's just an interesting thing, right? That might be, that's a, that's a touch point. We can create content about that, all of these things. and so, you know, there are so many examples, whether it's like, Hey, I'm going to write a guide about something that's, that's informative. Now, I think the thing that I struggle with with financial services is oftentimes it's very financial and like almost academic, and it needs to be more editorialized.

Right.

Thank

How can it actually be more editorialized and easier to kind of consume? And so we see this with, with newsletters, we see this with, with webinars and it's more so what can we learn from the way that people consume content more broadly? Short form video is through the roof across generations, right? My, my mom, my mom is, I'm going to age her. She's 67 and she scrolls like she's 21. That behavior spans generations because that has shown that

Mm-hmm.

We now can see that it doesn't matter about the generation. like consuming in this format. We like consuming short form video. Okay. So instead of doing an hour long zoom webinar.

Should we actually do the hour long zoom webinar, but then cut up the questions and answers into 20 short form videos that we can put online and let those find an audience, right? Because the algorithm on Tik TOK or Instagram or YouTube will find an audience for that content. So I think it's just about getting closer to how do people behave, how do they consume information? And then how can we say something that's valuable that isn't just by now and that also doesn't put them to sleep.

Hmm.

because oftentimes I see, whether it's portfolio managers or whoever, they start talking about all these percentages and you can just watch people, their eyes kind of glaze over, right? How can you make it interesting? How can you make it engaging and build that relationship over time? Now there is a time and place for that stuff where it's, you know,

returns, all of that specific stuff. But I think it's about how are you sequencing this information and making it so that you're not always coming in by now, you're not always coming in lecturing, you're not always coming in whatever, and you're editorializing it and having something to say other than by now.

Right.

Look, think that's great advice and bringing it back both to your Arcturus and the Red Bull examples. There's the layering information that is different from the technical specifications for the jacket. They're both important, but they have to happen at different times. And I think the layering information that kind of building the trust, building the brand awareness, building the relationship,

Yep. Yep.

Precedes that technical information that people are you know are going to dive into and I suppose it's the same in Red Bull like you'll probably look at the ingredients of the drink and what it is that gives you energy but there is before that you're probably getting awareness of the brand and the And you know the association that you've got with whether it's you know extreme sports or what-have-you, right?

Yeah. And, and what I would say about that is the ratio of investment in time is probably 80 20, 80 % on the building trust, 20 % on the technical specifications, maybe 90 10.

The conversion. Yeah. Yeah.

Right? So that's the thing for, for, for every, for every 10 things we say, one of them should be about by now. And nine of them should be value-based. And when I say value-based, mean, actually value-based, not like the kind of BS like, it's like a hidden kind of, you know, Trojan horse, like true value, whether you buy something or not from us, you will find value in this. And so that I think is something that, that marketers and business owners more broadly need to wrap their heads around.

Now, let's go back deeper into the wealth management side of things. Your research shows that high net worth individuals aren't necessarily hanging out. We talked about this a bit where wealth managers are posting content, the LinkedIn, et cetera. Can you share specific examples of this channel mismatch and perhaps how advisors might better...

Yep.

I'm going to cut that in the edit, okay, because we talked about that already. So you work with brands, Charlie, to analyze three key areas, audience behavior, competitor strategies, and content consumption patterns. For a wealth management firm that is trying to attract million dollar clients, what are some surprising insights you've discovered about how these individuals behave online?

Yeah, all good. Yeah, all good.

Yeah. So, I mean, it depends on getting into the segment, but I think more broadly, the reason why we look at those three kind of buckets, audiences, competitors, and content, I'll talk about why we look at those three and then what are the learnings that come out of the bottom of that. from an audience perspective, we want to understand how people behave, full stop. And when I say how people behave, behave is the key word. I want to watch what people do, not listen to what people say.

Hmm.

because everybody lies. so, so again, it's really, really important for us to get an understanding of, of how people are behaving across all of these devices. So what are they following on social media? What channels are they on? Are they on Facebook? Are they on Instagram? Are they on whatever? What websites are they going to? How long are they coming back there? Yes or no? What apps do they use? Et cetera, right? This starts to build a rough picture of like,

you

they are, where they spend time, and then, you know, what are they doing on that that channel? So this is where it goes to the next bucket, which I would say is content, right? So you're watching where people are spending time and kind of roughly what they're doing. And then I go, okay, oftentimes content means they're either reading something or they're watching something, or they're looking at something. So what are those things? What videos are they watching? Are those videos created by influencers or creators, or are they created by brands? Or is it a media company?

and

How are those, how long are those videos? Are they 30 second videos or 30 minute videos? Are they reading long form blog posts or quick listicle articles? Are they swiping carousels or looking at a static image of an infographic? Right? So content can be so rich because the message is all in the distribution. So understanding the distribution and reverse engineering that with audience behavior is super, super important. So that's kind of like the audience piece and the, and the content piece.

Mm-hmm.

Now, the competitor piece is I now want to get an understanding of what can I learn from our competitors and how are they reaching those people? How much are they spending? How are they targeting? How are they writing their messaging? How are they shooting their videos? How are they writing their articles? Are there any similarities between what they're doing and how people are behaving? Is there similarities and are there differences between those things? Because all of those are signals that we can then start to

Mm-hmm.

synthesize and pull together and go, oh, that's really interesting. There's a mismatch here or hey, well, simple is doing this. It's working super, super well. What if we did that? Something similar to that, put our own spin on it. Could we actually see returns from that? And so one of the things that we often say to our customers is, you know, your, your R and D department often taught you can learn a lot and let other people spend money and test things for you. Right.

And so let them spend the money and then see, it actually driving returns for them? And you can see that, right? If they're going to spend a whack load of money on Facebook ads, you can see how much they're spending. are data sets and tools out there that allow you to see that. You can see if it's driving traffic to their site. You can see if, are there videos getting viewed? Are there social handles growing in followers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? Like these are all different signals that you can see if that's working. So we think it's really important to look at all three of those buckets.

and then pull all that together and go, okay, cool. Now that we have visibility into this, how can we actually start to plan our activities? And when we talk about planning our activities, what channels should we focus on? What content should we be producing? How should we be producing it? typically we spend a lot of time doing written on LinkedIn. but when we look at actually all the behavior of the audience and we look at some competitors, they're actually seeing a lot of traction in short form video on YouTube.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

That's an interesting mismatch. Should we adjust our strategy to focus more on short form video and then prioritize publishing on YouTube because clearly there's an audience there and we can go kind of fish there fish where the fish are. So that's kind of how we think about it. Now some of the learnings that we've had broadly speaking is you know I think a lot of financial firms specifically advisors are like yeah everyone's on LinkedIn. They are.

But might I remind you that there are 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook and more, almost half of the world's internet population spends time on Facebook. So those high net worth individuals are likely on Facebook. They're also likely on Instagram. Now, what can you do to get in front of them? This is why it's important because they're not going to say, I'm rich, come target me. Right? Like that's not going to be their, their thing, but what are the signals that we can see? Well, we can see maybe they follow.

Thank

Right.

Typical things that high net worth individuals are associated with supercars golf luxury sports road cycling Do they follow luxury brands wine? Really high-end luxury travel, you know high-end brands Louis Vuitton Gucci, know, etc. Etc right now a whole bunch of people that follow those brands are very much can't afford that stuff and it's like aspirational However, there's a solid amount of them there

wine.

Mm-hmm.

that probably follow that because they're looking to buy the next, you know, handbag or they're looking to, you know, when, when Cervelo comes up with their next $25,000 carbon road bike, they're like, I need a new frame and I'm going to buy it. Right. So this is kind of the idea of how can we start to use that from a targeting perspective from, so running ads and targeting people who follow that sort of stuff.

Right.

We can use this from a content perspective. We could use this from a giveaway perspective. Let's say we were going to do a contest. Maybe we should actually give away a road bike. Let's see, right? Like there's so many different ways that we can use this stuff to fuel our marketing engine. So I think it starts with getting an understanding of how people are behaving and how the category is currently reaching that. And sometimes what you'll also find is the category isn't really good at reaching itself. So

the competitors might be really crappy. And that's where I would encourage folks to start to think, what are some adjacent categories that we could look from? Right? How could we, what can we learn about how other brands reach this group of people? So that's why I think it's important to also look at what is Gucci doing? What is Cervelo doing? Like what can we learn? Because they are also trying to reach this segment. They're ultimately selling to the same group of people, whether they're selling, you know, money management or a really expensive handbag.

Mm-hmm.

At the end of the day, they're trying to earn that person's attention and what are they doing? Now, if we're trying to sell our service and that's different than a product that someone can take to dinner at night, I understand that those are two different things, but there are probably things that we can learn there from a marketing perspective in terms of what are we saying, how are we packaging it up, et cetera, et cetera.

I love that. And I think when you're talking about learning from adjacent industries, I think you're so right. And it's not, you're not carbon copying it, but everything knowing that they're targeting the same people's, that you're targeting and for their attention, et cetera. There's always lessons that you can learn, which brings us nicely to our last question of our segment, which is that the big firms worry about

Yeah.

companies like Apple or Amazon that are in adjacent services, if you will, entering the core financial services market. Because every one of their clients are Apple or Amazon clients as well. Yet they struggle to compete with existing disruptors like we talked about, like the chimes of the world or the wealth symbols of the world. What advice would you give traditional firms about building authentic relationships with the younger digitally native

Yeah.

Yep.

investors and customers before the tech giants make their move.

Yeah, I think the question almost kind of answers itself in the first part of what you said, where it's like, you know, Hey, everyone's worried about Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google coming into financial yet. We currently ignore well, simple and chime. one, don't ignore well, simple and chime. They're already here. They're kind of doing it. So, so that's number one. number two, I think about it's a lot of the stuff we talked about. So build, build trust early. So don't come in and just say, buy now, buy now, buy now, buy now.

Yeah.

Number two, how can you actually speak to them in the language that they speak? Oftentimes financial services is seen as talking down and lecturing and you need to meet people where they're at. Right. And so I think this is something that the language that, that financial institutions need to learn to adopt while staying compliant to regulations. I've had this before where they're like, we can't say that that's against regulations. I think we can figure it out.

Hmm

Mm.

I think we're smart enough. I think we can figure it out. I think there's a way that we can be a little less buttoned up and meet people where they're at. And again, people will use my other favorite crutch. Well, they'll say that's not on brand. Well, last time I checked what's on brand is what the customer wants. Right. And so, so if, if, we couldn't possibly say that to them because we have to be really careful about what we say from regulation perspective. Okay, fine. Let's get creative. What if we do this and it aligns with the regulatory aspect? well, that's not on brand.

that's really weird because this group of people that we're trying to reach speaks like that.

Right? So, so I think that they're, they're actually like, cool. There's going to be a ton of objections around that, but I think it's really, really important. If you want someone to spend time with you you want to build trust, you have to speak the same language as them.

I totally love it. think you're absolutely bang on Charlie. It's not we can't expect them to want to work with us if we're not willing to engage them on the way that they want to be engaged in.

Absolutely. So that would be the first thing. I think the second thing is meet like fish where the fish are classic Charlie Munger quote fish where the fish are. What does that mean? Show up natively where they are. So if you were trying to reach someone who spends a ton of time on LinkedIn, or if you're trying to reach someone who spends a ton of time on, on YouTube shorts or on tick talk, cool. You have to show up there and you can't be

the adult coming into the room, like, hello, fellow kids, you know, like you have to actually, and this goes back to my other point of, of speaking the same language. How can you actually show up in a way that is seamless to where they spend time? Because then all this, that starts to build trust. And so I think the third piece of that is actually operationally to do those two things that I just described, you need to invest. And what I mean by invest the people working in your organization.

Right. You need to bring in really smart people who understand this cohort of people. That probably means hiring more people in Gen Z and millennial. Right. That means at the higher level, how are we actually like pushing this regulation still staying compliant, but how are we able to push and kind of do things that are kind of on the bleeding edge and give the creativity to that marketing organization so that they can actually do great work? How can you be the snowplow that allows them to kind of do that great work?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Right.

Well, and I would add one more thing to that if you tell me whether you agree. think it's important, as you say, if that target group, younger digitally native group is important. Yes, you need to hire people that can.

think and speak and relate to those individuals of that segment. But those people that you hired then also need to have the ear or the voice of the senior executives. It's not enough to be able to hire these people and say, yes, look, we're doing this segment. It's important, et cetera. But like we at the, you know, at the C-suite are going to focus on the usual traditional approaches, et cetera, not really give any, any,

Yes.

Yep.

Yep.

time or bandwidth to what this segment is telling us, right?

Yep, you're bang on. And that is the kind of like the last point of if you do that, you're actually taking a longer term view. Right. And it has to be a longer term view. Right. The everyone everyone like WealthSimple didn't just pop up today. They made those investments five, 10, 10 years ago, chime 10 years ago, Red Bull 30 years ago, you know, a lot of the companies that we're seeing now that yeah, to your point, the overnight success story 20 years in the making, right. So it is that fine balance of, of

Right.

How are you incentivizing the organization to work on these longer term pillar priorities while also delivering the short term growth that's needed to happen or the short term success that needed to happen. Now, what I'll say is simple, not easy, but that's like the focus of where the conversation should be. Yeah.

Awesome. Charlie, we're coming to the end of our podcast. So have a couple of rapid fire questions that I ask all my guests. So professionally, what is the most important lesson you've learned over the years?

Yeah.

Let's do it.

I think it's actually a Charlie Munger investing quote, fish where the fish are. And I think that is so applicable to marketing, the amount of marketers that spend time not fishing where the fish are. Another phrase, look before you leap. We have such a luxury in marketing today to get an understanding what's happening around us before we actually spend money and resources on things. know, fish where the fish are, look before you leap.

And then I guess the last one I would say is don't listen to what people say, watch what they do. Everybody lies.

I love that. And I think this is so all of it is applicable to financial advisors and the investing world. But I think the last one in particular, I think that as a behavioral scientist, I know that it's in everything that we do. It's what we believe in ourselves or in many cases, we don't even know about ourselves. So the behavior is the most critical thing that you should be watching. Number two, what is one practical tip you would offer listeners keen on applying your insights?

Yep.

So there's no shortage of insights. Everyone has insights everywhere. I think the key is anytime someone delivers you an insight, think about how can I act on this? How can I translate this into an action? So that would be number one is like always think about like everyone is just talking about insight, insight, insight. Cool. Enough of that. If you can take an insight and turn it into an action, what can I do today with this? That's number one. Number two is

Those actions that you're going to take, start small. You don't have to change, you know, you don't have to like throw the baby out with the bath water here. You don't have to change everything and fire, sell everything and completely up and everything. Start small, pick something specific and start testing with it. Hey, we have this insight. This was the hypothesized action that I wanted to take. And then I started to do that.

And then I closed the loop and I looked back and I was like, wow. Did that work or not work? Cool. And then continue. That's the final thing is this can't be a one night stand. It needs to be a relationship. You need to do this on an ongoing basis, because if you kind of just continue to do the same thing over and over again, you're going to get yourself into a lot of trouble.

Charlie, this has been a really entertaining, enjoyable, and informative discussion. If listeners want to learn more about you or write metric, where should they go?

Yeah, so I'm very active on LinkedIn, Charlie Grinnell. I also have a URL connectwithcharlie.ca. That'll take you right to my LinkedIn profile. I'm very active there. I post every day. And then WriteMetric, it's just writemetric.co. We have a whole bunch of resources on our site. And I'm pretty, I'm active in my DMs. So if anyone has questions, my email is on my LinkedIn. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. So you can shoot me an email. can slide into my DMs on LinkedIn. Always happy to nerd out.

Awesome. Charlie, thank you again for joining us today on the Future Ready Advisor.

Thank you very much for having me. I can't wait until the next one.

Likewise.