 Live from Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's the Cube, covering IBM Insight 2015, brought to you by IBM. Now your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin. Welcome back to IBM Insight in Las Vegas. We're here in the Mandalay Bay. Check out ibmgo.com. It's the digital social experience for IBM Insight. Check out the crowd chats. We're interacting with all the thought leaders. April Rudin is here. She's the president and founder of the Rudin Group. April, thanks for coming on the Cube. This is exciting. I mean, it's exciting to be in Vegas. There's so much going on and IBM Insight is a place to be. Plus we're talking about wealth, management, money. Exactly. What's more exciting than- Well, money is Vegas, right? I hope that we can keep some of the money. We're not losing too much money here in Vegas. The first advice you give your clients is stay away from the grabstables. Exactly, yeah, grabstables. John's police said when he came on the Cube, where do you think the casino owners got all their money? You think they got it from gambling in other casinos? I don't know. I still have my shirt on. Well, who do you think advises them? That's really my space. Okay, so tell us about Rudin Group. What are you guys all about? So what we do is we help our financial services clients create marketing programs to become better known in the space. Brand awareness, creating content, and then distribution. And then of course we need analytics to measure and make sure that what we're doing is actually being seen and then adjust for that. So you founded this company? Seven years ago, just after the financial crisis. Okay, so. Good time to start a business. It was a good time to start a business. It's a good point and people asked me that. But the truth is that that was the time when financial services really took a look and a more introspective look at themselves to understand what they need to do to become successful in the future. Yeah, so but you've been following this business for quite some time, you've seen. Describe the changes in the wealth management business because we can all relate to it. Whether it's the insurance salesperson knocking on your door, whether it was the guy with the big house in the office, or the big name firm reeling you in. So help us understand how that business has changed. So the truth is, unfortunately, that business has not changed so much. Many times I'll talk about the Flintstones versus the Jetsons. So what my firm tries to do and what I know IBM tries to do is move this laggard industry, which is wealth management and financial services, into the future. There haven't really been too many changes up until now, but I think we're right at the brink of a huge opportunity for wealth management, both in terms of the fact that there's a giant seismic wealth transfer that we're in the middle of right now, which is baby boomers transferring huge sums of money to millennials, and millennials having totally different buying habits than what their baby boomer parents did. They're no longer impressed by some of the big brands, but they want portal, they want digital, they want technology, and that's the interface that they want. So how is analytics changing wealth management? Well, it's what analytics can do to change wealth management. Yeah, how should it? How should it change wealth management? So wealth management is mainly made up of, of course, quants, these are financial services professionals, and I think that they are very drawn to predictive analytics, and they're drawn to the entire ROI on their investments. And one of the things that I try to bring to them is that they need to think of technology, not as a revenue generator, and not as an expense item. So they need to change up their thinking a little bit. But you know, the big banks have always been kind of IT shops, so you think they get that, but that hasn't translated into the wealth management business. Is that what I'm hearing? Well, yes and no. So it's mainly, they are tech shops, but it's back office or middle office, and I'm talking about the client facing stuff, and that's what my customers- The customer experience. Exactly, the customer experience is what needs to change, and the way that they approach clients needs to change, and that's how predictive analytics can help. Okay, so the customer experience, well, worst case, but not uncommon, once a year you get a statement. And say, here's how you did, or maybe you get something quarterly, or maybe even monthly, or maybe you'd sit down with a financial planner, a wealth management executive, annually. How would we do this year? Well, what'd the S&P 500 do? Here's how we did, but remember we have different objectives, et cetera. Correct. Is that changing? So that is changing. I mean, first of all, the once a year meeting just doesn't cut it anymore. The paper report just doesn't make it. The 50 page PDF, say goodbye. We're taking a look at how advisors and other financial services can professionals can present data in ways that make it easier for their own end clients to consume, easier for them to make decisions on, and easier for them to understand what's going on in their own portfolios, not only now, but make their own predictive analytics work for themselves. You mentioned earlier that you advise companies on how to market themselves and raise their visibility. You said you're a social media, very active in social media. I wonder, in the area of marketing analytics, we hear a lot about marketers spending a lot of money, more money on IT than IT on analytics within a couple of years, yet it seems like when it comes down to the metrics they use, it still comes down to page views and visitors and these sort of impressions, these sort of meaningless measures that are relics of 20 years ago. Do you see that changing? Well, I hope so. I think you bring up a very good point. A lot of these metrics and analytics and things that people are looking at are not necessarily relevant, especially in financial services. So particularly we work with clients in the high net worth space, people that are looking for high net worth clients. So one page view is not equal to one page view. That's something else, that underlying metrics and analytics don't take into consideration who the person is that's looking. I heard an interesting stat the other day from an individual who focuses on those high net worth people. He was saying exactly what you were saying, April, that there's a massive transfer of wealth and the millennials are totally different than their parents and grandparents. And one of the big things that he cited was that the people who are inheriting all this money are saying, we wanna do good. We wanna actually deploy this for philanthropic purposes. Help us figure that out. Are you hearing that? Absolutely, that's a great point too. So whereas baby boomers were really looking at investments that were solely based on firms and ideas and things that resonated with them, millennials, their measure of success is not always how much money did they make. But it's also, it's imbued in that is how good did they do, what did they actually do? So their idea of success is much different than their baby boomer parents. And many times it comes down to reframing the conversation in marketing, right? So that people can understand that certain investments, even though they might be with firms that are not typically thought of as philanthropic in nature, do philanthropic work. So somebody mentioned to me, here's an example about McDonald's. Is McDonald's, is that a socially responsible investment? And when you frame it as thinking about French fries and hamburgers, it doesn't appear to be. When you think about them as being a huge employer, global employer around the world, low-cost insurance provider around the world, you can think of different ways to reframe them in terms of their social impact. So the tech business and the money business are sort of colliding. What technologies are sort of exciting you and your clients? Well, the exciting thing is just about everything. So I feel like financial services is gonna leapfrog over some of the ideas and things that consumer brands and some of the other sectors have been playing with. So you don't have to explain to Coke and Pepsi what the ROI is, let's say for social media. They get it. And in a regulated industry like financial services and in dealing with professionals who aren't used to marketing, it becomes more of a conversation. And what's happening now is actually clients are pushing up on wealth management because the average age of financial advisors is around 55. So they're thinking about checking out and their clients are pushing up on technology. So there are a lot of forces at play. This is a big issue for them because they see that their clients are that there's this wealth transfer is taking place over the next 15 years or so. And a lot of these particularly high net worth wealth management companies don't really know how to relate to that millennial audience. And certainly if you look at the websites of some of these wealth management companies, they're 15 years old. What kind of advice are you giving them in terms of an online presence in an on-time online marketing position and the types of services that they offer in the high wealth space? What kind of advice are you giving them? That's a great question because a lot of times for sure their websites are dinosaurs. They don't play on mobile and they also use a lot of iconography that's so old, picture of a yacht, a lighthouse, a compass, right? And they talk about their history and how long they've been around. Exactly, and that's a complete turnoff for millennials. You can read just about any study on that and see that. They don't want to know that, they want to know what have you done for me today? The compass. The compass, exactly. They don't want to run from the compass. Run from the compass, run from the yacht. Retirement is different now. Millennials are traveling the world now, right? They're not waiting for retirement. They're all these dynamics at place. But to go back to your question on marketing, what financial services firms need to have is good, smart, compelling content marketing strategy. They need to put out infographics. They need to embrace new ways of showing numbers instead of the old bar charts and line graphs and things that they're used to putting out. That 50 page PDF that you were talking about earlier, sending to your clients, it doesn't go anymore. So give us some ideas. There's a forester study about content marketing that came out just last month. They did a big survey and they found that about 70% of business executives said that they read the content that they get from vendors, they scan it and throw it in the trash. And so most of this effort is being wasted. Do you see anybody who does it really well in your market? There are some people that do it really well. And the people that do it really well are those firms that will take something that's a case study and use it to relate to other clients because that's how to be effective. One of the things that's not effective in financial services is a lot of pie-in-the-sky type content, top-of-the-funnel type content, things that really don't resonate with end clients. So the best kind of content marketing that I see is that which really ties a particular success that you've had so that other people can see that success and that's really what resonates. So case studies are an effective marketing vehicle? Case studies are a very effective marketing vehicle. The idea of overall thought leadership at a brand level really doesn't fly so much anymore because millennials are not so interested and excited by these big brands, they're actually turned off. So how do you keep in touch with what millennials care about? Well, I do a lot of field research with my two boys at home. I have two sons in college and they're my first line of market research. But I spend my time going to a lot of conferences and doing a lot of reading. Sometimes I call myself the oldest woman in social media. I've been active in social media for almost 10 years now and when I first started, most of my friends had no idea what I was talking about. So what about social media? I mean, a lot of the financial world are averse to social media. Yes, they are. They had the big bank that tried to do the little, whatever, the Tweet Up and Fire. SGPM, right? Yes. SGPM is like, why are you, you don't want that question. Right. So what about that potential backlash? How do you navigate your clients through that? That's also a great question because it's a regulated industry financial services, we need to create content that's compelling but yet is not, and also is compliant. So you're not allowed to give advice, you're not allowed to give forecasts. So what we do is try to create content that on the other hand is compelling in the way that people can understand it and reach it. And the best way to do that is I think through case studies, as I mentioned before, but also just by being authentic and transparent. Millennials wanna understand process. They wanna understand how decisions are made. And so the more authentic content can be about explaining and talking about how things go rather than the content, let's say, of the old days, which was just trust us for the big bank. I've been around for a long time, right? Yes, exactly. How are people measuring the success of their content marketing? Is it downloads? Is it tracking something through the pipeline? How do you help people measure it? It's all of those things. But for most firms, it's not any one of those things. So what they need to do is create an actual strategy that allows them to measure that in a measured way, the same way as they would measure their investment performance. And that's something I feel very strongly about that I talk about. So you would create an investment strategy portfolio for your clients, you would track and you would measure the investments that you made over time. And the very same thing needs to be done for marketing. What are some of the most common myths about millennials that you run into that you can explode here? I think some of the most common myths is that they're gonna, number one, they're gonna go away. Well, demographics would tend to tell you otherwise. Right, but they're not big wealth holders now. And the truth is they are big wealth holders. They're receiving money. It's being transferred to them by their parents. And the second thing that I think is another myth regarding their influence is that they're creating wealth at a much earlier age. So because of technology, you have a lot of technology millionaires now. You only have to look as far as Silicon Valley or some of the other money centers around the world to see how many young people have started businesses and created their own wealth. So what are you seeing it in sight, April? I mean, what kind of information are you gathering? What are your takeaways from the show? Well, you know, it's only just begun. So I don't want to overshoot myself here because I'm excited for the rest of the conference. But one of the most exciting things for me was the internet of things this morning. And I want to hear more about Watson. The most important thing that I heard today that I think really was very exciting was the idea of machines learning and machines creating more value over time. I can tell you this. There certainly was a time where IBM had planned obsolescence and machines were only good for a short period of time. So in my mind, I put those two things together and I thought that was the most exciting thing was that machine learning creates more value over time instead of less. Excellent. All right, well, we'll have to leave it there. Thanks, April, for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations with all your success and sharing your insights. Thank you. Thank you. All right, keep right there. We'll be back with our next guest is theCUBE. We're live from IBM Insight 2015. We'll be right back.