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- [00:00]
Kim Rosenblum
Foreign.
- [00:13]
Brent Csutoras
Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.
- [00:32]
Allison Schiff
I'm Allison Schiff and you're listening to Ad Exchanger Talks. My guest this week is Kim Rosenblum, CMO at Betterment and a longtime media veteran who's spent more than two decades at Viacom helping to shape iconic brands like Nickelodeon, Nick at Night, and TV Land. At Betterment, Kim sits right at the crossroads of brand and performance and finance and technology, and she's steering a marketing strategy built around long term investing. At a time when markets are volatile, AI is changing how people search and politics is making its way into everything. We'll talk about how she's rebalanced Betterment's media mix, how AI is reshaping their content and acquisition strategy, the company's custom bidding algorithm, live sports partnerships, and what it really takes to build trust in a money app. But first, it's time for you to get your ticket to programmatic AI taking place May 18th through the 20th in Las Vegas. We'll be getting into all things AI related, from AI in media planning and agentic optimization to responsible AI and measurement reinvented. We've got a great lineup of speakers, including folks from JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, AI People Inc. Horizon Media, WPP Media, Good Apple, and much more. So go to the website and check out the agenda. Podcast listeners get 10% off the price of their ticket when they use The Code podcast pod 10. That's pod 10.
- [01:59]
Brent Csutoras
See you there. Hey Kim, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:04]
Kim Rosenblum
Thank you. Nice to be here, Allison.
- [02:07]
Brent Csutoras
So what is one thing that not a lot of other people already know about you? Maybe a weird hobby? Something from another chapter of your life?
- [02:16]
Kim Rosenblum
I my weird thing isn't that weird. It's more impressive in my opinion. I can do a handstand.
- [02:24]
Brent Csutoras
That is impressive. I was really guilty of the people who could do cartwheels.
- [02:29]
Kim Rosenblum
Gym pass. I did yoga for a long time. I've now transitioned to more like yoga on the beach in the summer. But I was very committed to anusara specific type of yoga in studio and we worked really hard to get to handstand poses and I um, I can still do an assisted handstand on the wall, but there was a day when I could actually do a freestanding handstand in the middle of the floor. So I don't think very many people know that and I'm was. It was a big accomplishment. So I'm happy to share it with you.
- [03:02]
Brent Csutoras
Now our listeners do I'm struggling. I want to find, like, a good segue, like what it's like to do a handstand and what that means for your, you know, your approach to marketing. Balance. There we go.
- [03:13]
Kim Rosenblum
That's a good one. Balance with a strong core. There are a lot of parallels and focus, frankly, you got to really, like, focus and drive. Like, you got to want it. You're not flipping your body upside down unless you really want to.
- [03:28]
Brent Csutoras
So I guess you really want this. I want to talk a little bit about your background before we talk about all the stuff that you're doing at Betterment. You came to Betterment after quite a long run in entertainment and media. More than 20 years at Viacom, EVP and chief creative officer and head of marketing for Nickelodeon. I watched a lot of Nickelodeon in my day. EVP of marketing and creative, TV Land, SVP and creative director for TV Land and Nick at Nite. Also watched a lot of Nick at Nite back in. Back in the day, Brady Bunch and Bewitched, all of that stuff. I really loved it when I was a kid. And then you made a move out of entertainment into what, at least on the surface feels like a very different sector, financial services. And not just financial services, but like, robo advising. And when we're talking about money, you're basically sitting, like, right at the intersection of people's hopes and fears and life plans. So when you think about marketing Betterment, I want to ask about strategy. Do you see it as closer to entertainment? You know, telling stories, building characters and that sort of thing? Or is it closer to what you traditionally think of as financial services marketing, which is a focus on responsibility and really thinking about the guardrails? Or is it something that straddles both?
- [04:49]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, it's probably a hybrid. I think there are more parallels than you would assume, though. Your entertainment choices are very personal. They're very emotional. Like, if you tell me the shows you watch, the streaming services you like, I'll know a lot about you and, you know, I'll know and they'll be different. You know, if you're a Love island fan, that's going to tell me one thing, you know, different than, you know, an adolescence fan, let's just say. So your. Your interests kind of transcend categories. And I feel like money and financial services is the same way. It's very personal. Money is incredibly personal, and maybe there's nothing more personal. And it's very emotional and how you feel about it and your confidence and your, you know, trust in your partner, your. Your Your brand that you've affiliated with is really important. So I actually think there's many more parallels that people, especially since I grew up in cable, as you mentioned Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite and TV Land, super strong brands that stood for something. And so for me at Betterment, it was very important to make sure our brand stood for something and that when someone chose to be a Betterment customer, as opposed to a customer at a more traditional financial service company or maybe one that's more transactional, more of a predictive market type of fintech, that would just say something, that says something about you. So I think that what we stand for and we're really focused on long term investing and long term wealth building, you know, and who you are as a person. And if you come to Betterment, I think that's, that, that, that says a lot about you, just like your TV choices. So I see them pretty similar actually. I also think that my work at Nickelodeon in the 2010s and beyond was really, really interesting because we were talking about Gen Z, who of course are now the emerging investing generation. And I was in a bunch of meetings and hearing insights and we were talking about how kids today back then wanted to grow up to be influencers and YouTube stars. And I'm sitting in meetings today and we're hearing Gen Z investors really admire YouTube stars and they're looking for like gig jobs, like being an influencer. So a lot of what I learned about this generation of investing comes from my experience at Nickelodeon.
- [07:17]
Brent Csutoras
So I'm about, I don't even know how many decades too late to watching the Sopranos. I just started watching them. What does that say about me? I wonder what segment does that put me in?
- [07:28]
Kim Rosenblum
I think that maybe puts you in the like dark and gritty, you know, with like a little side of spice, I don't know.
- [07:37]
Brent Csutoras
And also just late, so late to the game.
- [07:40]
Kim Rosenblum
That's okay. I think that's okay. And that's like back to financial services. It doesn't matter when you start. You should just start. The fact that you didn't start Sopranos until yesterday doesn't matter because now you're in it and now you're, now you're part of the club.
- [07:52]
Brent Csutoras
Let's talk a little bit about where Betterment sits in the market. Like between, I don't know, like old school incumbents on one side, the newer investing apps on the other. It feels like you are in the middle there. Like you're not necessarily one or the other. But how would you describe your Lane and like who your users are exactly?
- [08:12]
Kim Rosenblum
Well, our users are people who like to optimize. They are people who say okay, I could do a lot of research and I'm going to do a lot of research. I'm highly educated, I'm interested in knowing but I'm not going to spend my time which is my most precious commodity. My, my life is very busy. I'm not going to spend my time executing on a strategy. I would rather outsource that to somebody I trust. So they're really super knowledgeable, very interested in the category or like whatever it is they're doing. Not passive at all but, but don't want to be involved on a day to day basis. So passive in terms of like you manage it but active in terms of understanding like the market dynamics and what the services we have offer. So to me it's a very unique thing because it's not a very transactional product. We're not, we're not a highly, you know, we have a self directed investing product but we don't push a lot of like day trading. We're not incentivizing anyone to trade more. We are a fiduciary. So we always do whatever's in your best interest which is most often not the long course and staying through volatility and staying calm. So we're very sort of of that mind. The flip side is the traditional sort of more like established brand names maybe you know, don't quite understand who you are. They don't quite understand that you're mobile first, that you want a very intuitive UX that you are not really going to wait for, you know, information to come to you, you're going to seek it out. So again our products simple use lots of good tool tips embedded. So it's really kind of a mix of what you get with very savvy investors who know a lot but also a very like passive easy experience.
- [10:03]
Brent Csutoras
Well you have and I want to talk about volatility because you just mentioned that word and we're living in a very interesting time, I'll use that word. A lot of market volatility, volatility over the past few years, rate hikes, inflation, crypto booms, crypto busts, there's a war happening right now. And so you have this very interesting vantage point where you oversee growth and performance, brand and creative. So how does that macro roller coaster impact how you approach growth and then even the tone of your marketing?
- [10:38]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, it is crazy time. It's dynamic for sure. I joined Betterment right in the meme stonk, like takeoff, like in early 2021. And I, I don't really think. And then crypto followed, then it was a cash, then it was crypto winter and then cash was king. And then the markets came back and then liberation day. So it has really been in my five years and change here, very volatile and a lot of ups and downs. And I would say you have to do two things simultaneously. One, you have to like, you know, practice what you preach. Stay the course, do not be reactive. This is not, you know, people who took out money in Covid regret it because although the market dipped, it recovered. So we do believe, and we have the performance to prove it, that long term, you know, stay the course is the way to go. So part of our job in marketing, which is a strange thing for a marketer, but lot of our job is to say do not engage. It's like anti marketing. It is. There is no FOMO here, nothing to see here. Go back and live your life because that is really what's going to be best for you long term. The other thing is we don't want to look like we don't know what's going on. We don't want to be like we have our head in the sand and we're just saying, oh, set it and forget it. Nothing to see here. So we do work hard in those moments to make sure we have content that's really timely that we put out. We have a great stable of subject matter experts here. So we just published an article about oil prices and how that affects the bond market. We push that out, you know, through email, through social, when the, you know, when the story's right, we can talk about global diversification because we are very much a diversified portfolio strategy. So when tariffs were a big thing, you know that this time last year when tariffs started, like, to, to really shake things up, we did talk a lot about how our core portfolio is already globally diversified so that you're covered in these moments. So again, it's that balance of like being topical, being in the conversation, but always tacking back to like the tried and true strategy of stay the course.
- [12:43]
Brent Csutoras
So marketing as education. And you also, you want people to engage. Engagement is always what you hear marketers talk about, but you don't want them to engage to the point where they're like picking a scab. Right? Like they shouldn't be so focused that they're not letting you help them be the best that they can be, which of course is the goal. So you just want to keep them, I guess, as informed as possible, but give them the confidence that they can step back and just let you do your thing.
- [13:10]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah. And in moments like now, very little activity is success. We actually don't want our customers, you know, in there fiddling around. The other thing I think we've been very smart about is we have a diversified product strategy. So while we are the pioneer in robo advising, we have added products over the years. And for example, we have an excellent cash product which has a high apy. So we allow you to have everything in one place and then transfer easily within accounts. So what's been really interesting on cash is, you know, watching the Fed meeting is now like a new. With prediction markets. Forget it. It's like a new pastime. I don't know that, you know, pre Covid or, or before the Jerome Powell became a headline, you know, a headline. Clickbait. Jerome Powell clickbait. I don't think people were really tracking the interest rates and what the Fed meeting was. And now they are. And so having a cash product which is also really tied to like, what's going on with the Fed and, and having a really competitive APY by the nature of how we run our program is great too, because now you can come here and you can have like, you can stay the course in investing, but you can also have like in a more sort of like just stable cash program and like I said, transfer between them. So I think we've done a really good job of also diversifying from our core.
- [14:33]
Brent Csutoras
I imagine, though, that messaging is challenging because finance has become politicized. Everything has become politicized and you just want to be a neutral advisor so people can. Right. Get something out of your product. By the same token, almost anything can be twisted and you can be dragged into stuff you don't want to be dragged into. How do you avoid that?
- [14:53]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, well, I would say you can be dragged in, but you want, you have, you have to choose. You'd have to choose to be dragged in. Like, we're not really, you know, we aren't political. We are obviously the markets are affected by political. But again, if you're like staying the course, it shouldn't matter. I think being educated without necessarily being pushed in a particular, into a particular action requires constraint and requires like a good marketing sort of, you know, sort of balance of engaging but not provocative. So we just work hard to do that and we've worked really hard to make sure that our brand is consistent. And we also have other lines of business in addition to our retail, our direct to consumer, we have to B2B lines. We work with small and growing businesses on a providing a 401k and then we also work with advisors who use our platform to run their book. So it's also like we have diversified our business model so we're also not as reactive to the daily markets and the daily consumer ups and downs because those 401 business and those advisor business are going to be much more long term.
- [16:00]
Brent Csutoras
I mean you've been very explicit about wanting betterment to be seen as a long term investing partner and not just a place to dabble or to park cash. And you recently did a brand refresh around that more I guess like grown up vibe. So you've already touched on like what informed that move. But were there any like sacred cows you had to kill along the way? Anything that you had to pull back on doing that you would normally do that just didn't make sense now that you were, I don't know, not that you were ever all about meme stocks and instant gratification, but when you were positioning yourself as contrary to that.
- [16:38]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, well, I think I'll go to media. One of the things we did was we also looked at our media mix and we ended up pulling back on social. Not that we, I mean obviously social is part of our mix clearly, but we put it more in balance because what we also realized was we were measuring cac. So when I got here it was really. And cac, you know, continues to be an incredibly important measure. Like, you know, what are we spending to acquire that customer? But we were not really looking at the long term value. We weren't looking at the retention and how much we can project that they'll deposit and grow over time. And so this shift to sort of a more long term brand and more adult made us pause and say like what's real? Like what's the real measure of success here? And we went back and revisited ROAS return on ad spend because that really projects how long we think the customer, if we can project like over the next year. And then obviously the customer marketing programs we've put in place, we've gotten much more sort of, I don't know, what's the word? Like we've gotten much more comfortable with doing promotional offers for tenured customers which in the past if you were looking at cac, you wouldn't have done that because you're just spending money again on customers you already acquired. But we really feel like loyalty and having like long term relationships, you know, meant Roas was a more important measure of success on the acquisition and that promos for tenured customers was a smart tactic. And so we're doing both of those.
- [18:11]
Brent Csutoras
It is a good investment. Haha. A little wordplay because otherwise you're also cheaping. Sorry, chasing cheap, Chasing cheap accounts. I fall into spoonerism sometimes, you know, sass the pulse.
- [18:26]
Kim Rosenblum
So.
- [18:26]
Brent Csutoras
But yes, you're not just chasing cheap accounts that might churn and that's not a good use of your money.
- [18:32]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah. And I think there's a lot of trialers out there and I get that and that's fine. And I'm not saying you shouldn't come to betterment to trial, but what we were seeing when we were just like chasing that without putting like the value of the customer, we were just chasing the CAC was a lot of that trialing. $100 and then you're out. And we again, as a long term platform, you're not going to see performance in the short term with $100. Like that's just not how it's designed. This is, you know, this is a place you come to put an Iraq, hopefully max it out and leave it for 30 years so that you've compounded all your investment and your growth and you can retire. Like that's, that's the premise. And so I think it's also really important in the media mix that we have like a full funnel because it's a long term relationship and a high consideration product. So we're not interested in just, just click, you know, just CPA ads. We want to have brand ads. We want to have like a full funnel story.
- [19:32]
Brent Csutoras
And one more quick one before we hit our break. That whole focus on quality over quantity, that mindset make it a little more real for me. Any concrete changes you've made in terms of how you target or measure or optimize that keeps that front and center.
- [19:49]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, well, like I said, we went to ROAS to return on ad spend as our primary metric. So that, that's a big part of it. But we also, we worked with IPSOS last year on a media mix analysis and we were looking at like what, which, which tactic has which outcome. And we were, I don't say surprised, but we were pleasantly, we were, we were pleasantly awakened that a lot of our brand and the things that you would call very top of funnel, like just programmatic but television ads were converting. So what we were, we really learned is that you can't just say oh my digital ads or my direct response media is Where I'm going to measure my, my, my acquisition success. We realized. No, actually that's not true at all. Like the brand stuff drives acquisition as well. And of course the acquisition tactics benefit from the brand.
- [20:45]
Brent Csutoras
Well, just one other observation. That's why it's nice to wear two hats, because you don't have brand and performance sitting in two different lanes. You're, you're that person. So you can think about both of them at the same time.
- [20:58]
Kim Rosenblum
I mean, podcast is a perfect example. Unless you have. It's different from maybe an E commerce or very transactional where you can do a code. But we weren't advertising in podcasts because there was an attribution on podcasts for acquisition. And of course there's, you know, a huge genre of financial services podcasts. There are, you know, even, you know, adjacent just sort of news, current events and like I said back to our optimizer, lots of content on podcasts that appeal to them. And so we made a decision a couple years ago to bring podcasts back into the mix. And we weren't really so much saying is this, you know, putting a code and you know, looking to see attribution. But we were doing brand studies, we've been doing a longitudinal brand study and we have seen steady growth in all qualities.
- [21:49]
Brent Csutoras
That is interesting. Right, because it could so easily inform your strategy where you move away from something that has a lot of value because it's not easily measurable and you just excise it without accounting for what it is good for.
- [22:02]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, I think that comes to trust. And you know, we're a financial services company so we believe trust is paramount and we believe trust internally. Like the cfo, the CEO, they have trust in the marketing plan and they, and they know that it's a long term play.
- [22:17]
Brent Csutoras
All right, well, we're going to take a quick break and when we're back, we're going to talk about AI. We're going to talk about this custom bidding algorithm that you guys worked on, which I think is so nerdy and so cool and a bunch of other good stuff. So stick with us.
- [22:42]
Kim Rosenblum
Foreign.
- [22:46]
Brent Csutoras
Welcome back. And as promised, we're going to shift over to AI. So at a very practical level, where is AI being embedded into your marketing stack in your workflow today? Is it like Creative Media Optimization, analytics workflow, like wherever it's really real, something you're actually using it for?
- [23:05]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, well, we are using it in, in all the ways. I'll start with the first thing we did, which is I'm very proud of we started to notice that traffic was declining about this time last year when LLM queries were starting to rise and people were really starting to understandably go to a, you know, go to an LLM, go to ChatGPT and ask, you know, what's better for me, a traditional or Roth ira. And we've always worked with a lot of affiliate and publishing partners and, and so to see that shift and to see that, that shift to LLMs and then our slightly declining traffic was worrisome. So we pretty quickly recalibrated. We worked with X Funnel, which is now part of HubSpot, to basically do an audit of all of our content and our website. And we in the last six months have restructured a lot of our content. We've done some things to make them more LLM friendly. We've written content specifically for LLMs. I'll give you like one micro example. A lot of our blog posts were written by betterment editors and we went back and actually gave them names with credentials because they're not really written by betterment editors. They're bitten by Ben Backham who's a cfp because the LLM understandably wants a credible source. So we did all sorts of little micro things and we have reversed the trend. And in fact in first quarter we had our highest traffic in my history here. So we actually sort of took, took that like AEO moment and said this is an opportunity for us. And I don't think it's just that it's amongst other reasons that our traffic's up. But I feel really good about that. So that was just job one. We in acquisition and in media, of course we're using in the performance max in our program, of course that's got AI components now. But one of the things we're looking at, and it's tricky because we're highly regulated and I'll come back to that, is we're looking at bringing in agentic advertising in SEM. And that is tricky for us because every ad we run has to be compliance approved and has to have record keeping behind it. So we're really trying to figure out a way to be more responsive to what ads and keywords and you know, what's working. But we also want to do it in a way that's fully compliant and I think we are pretty close to cracking it and we might be one of the first to do it. So I'm pretty excited about that. So that's like another example. And then to your other question, in terms of creative, yes, we're using it for. We're using it very much to just resize banners and do some of the stuff that is, you know, pretty, pretty time consuming, but very important, especially, again, back to being regulated. If you have disclosures, like how those disclosures live on your ad and all the size units is really critical. So we're using AI for that. But we also created a Persona we have. Like any good advertiser, we have a really good handle on who our core target is, who our customer is for media planning. So we took all those inputs, we fed it into an LLM, and we created a Persona. And when you're writing an email or you're writing a headline or you're testing some things out, you give it to the Persona and you ask the Persona for some feedback on your work. So we're using it in all of
- [26:33]
Brent Csutoras
those ways to go back to what you were saying regarding making these little changes to content. I think that's really interesting because there is this, like, oh, this feeling of, oh, my God, now I have to create all of this new stuff. I need to figure out what LLMs want to eat. But really it's just like adding or tweaking, really, like one ingredient and not having to reinvent everything. Just recalibrating a little bit and using what you have so that it shows up better.
- [27:00]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah. And we are tracking what is. What are people asking? What are. What is what queries are going to the LLMs. Because before you'd make content and you would wait for signal on. Did people read that article? Was that picked up? How did that perform? Now we can actually get signal from the LLMs about what do people want to know about? So we can create content that we know they're already searching for, which is a nice reverse. The other piece is we can do more segmentation. So specifically, Millennial, which is our core customer, are much more interested in going into the weeds, knowing the context, knowing the market conditions. Gen Z, the next emerging, and about 10% of our customers are Gen Z right now are not as interested in that. They want foundational, they want fundamental. So I think what we really have an opportunity to do is now do more segmented content without having to double our resources or double our output. We can take an article, we can customize it for Millennial, and then we can pull out and make a version that works for Gen z.
- [28:05]
Brent Csutoras
What about ChatGPT? Are you guys going to advertise in ChatGPT?
- [28:09]
Kim Rosenblum
It's interesting because we already come up as a source, right. So that was a big goal. So we're already being cited as a source and we have gotten feedback, especially on 401k and small businesses. We've heard from people. Wow. ChatGPT, like loves you guys and like, thank you. So we'll see, we'll see if we need to like actually invest or if the showing up in the query is, you know, sufficient.
- [28:34]
Brent Csutoras
So switching gears a bit, you guys built this custom bidding script to refine your ad strategy and get more precise about who you reach and how much you pay to reach those people. It's very cool, but I'd love if you could walk me through it. We wrote about it, there's an article on Ad Exchanger about it. But explain it in just human language, what the script actually does and why it was worth investing in something custom rather than just relying on an off the shelf tool.
- [29:02]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, well, this is with adswerve, our partner who does most of our Programmatic. And they were noticing that while we were getting good click through, we weren't. We can go all the way through conversion, but also what, like, what's your balance? What's your initial balance? And they felt that we were doing well on clicks, but maybe not as well on conversion and definitely not as well on performance. So the script was designed based on the inputs that we had from what was like our ideal customer, our ideal conversion, and then work backward to say, okay, so, and this is just targeting right now that we know all of these inputs, let's go now and look for that person through the, through this custom script. And one of the things that we discovered, which goes back to the full funnel point, is that you kind of need all of the, you need all of the tactics. Some of those lowly banners at the bottom of your mobile, you know, mobile banners were actually performing as were TV spots and Programmatic. So that was like a reassuring. So, you know, you have your ipsos, you do your media mix, you look for conversion, but then this custom script can actually tell you with precision what worked and then replicate it at scale.
- [30:15]
Brent Csutoras
So display banners and TV things that people poo poo or sideline because they're, you know, just old workhorses, they do perform. It just depends on how you weave them into your mix and also how you measure them.
- [30:28]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, that's right. And we also, I think, do a really good job of having always on media where we have partners, we're on rate tables, we're in affiliate content, you know, we're, we're, we're doing a lot of different things. And always on and then layering in campaigns, which frankly, if you go back to entertainment, is exactly what entertainment does. You had, you know, on air promo inventory. You're watching a show, you see, you know, on your own platform, you had your own inventory. And then you walk down the street and you'd see a billboard, you know, so it's the same thing having an always on strategy and then pulsing in campaigns at specific times. So, like, for example, we had a campaign with Drake May, who was one of our brand ambassadors, and that was sitting on top of our always on strategy.
- [31:11]
Brent Csutoras
So, yeah, let's. Let's talk about Drake May. So he's a New England Patriot. He was the third overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft. And for people who haven't seen it yet, you just mentioned it. Betterment partnered with. With Drake right. As he was breaking through on the national stage, heading into a Super bowl run. I mean, yes, the Patriots didn't win the super bowl, but still, that is a big swing sort of partnership for. For betterment. So what was the strategic logic behind choosing him specifically? Although I know you have partnerships with
- [31:41]
Allison Schiff
a bunch of different folks and what
- [31:43]
Brent Csutoras
you get out of something like this beyond just having your logo next to an athlete?
- [31:48]
Kim Rosenblum
Right. Well, we're really proud because we picked Drake as he was leaving college, but pre draft, so it was good call. Yeah, we're good at investing. We're good at looking all the inputs and saying we think this will be a good investment. We also really thought Drake personified the brand. He's super calm. I don't know if you know him or not, but he's very calm under pressure. He. He's very sort of like Steady Eddie. He's kind of an anti FOMO guy. And we liked that he felt very like personification of Betterment and then back to like just basic media. Live sports is the highest reach vehicle there is. And so it's not just like being with an athlete, but it's also trying to find the audience that's, you know, watching live sports. So we've expanded beyond Brooke Drake. We just recently became the exclusive financial wellness sponsor for a 10. We were in their men's and women's basketball tournament, which led to March Madness. Just the earned media on that is, I just think, really important because again, we're still building awareness.
- [33:05]
Brent Csutoras
So, yeah, you brought up Atlantic 10, which I have to be honest, I had to Google it because I do know a bunch about. My mother is this huge NBA fan, so I know a lot about the NBA but it's the college athletic conference for the east coast schools just in case people don't know what it is. And you're the financial wellness partner tied to the basketball championships and there's this education component for student athletes and for the broader community. So yeah, I mean it's an interesting kind of partnership because it's about financial literacy. But I'm. And there's a branding aspect, but there's also an acquisition upside. Right. So how are you thinking about a partnership like that which has a lot of kind of broad KPIs, multiple KPIs and then how are you measuring it?
- [33:52]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, well, we're definitely looking for impressions. So. And we just wrapped up. We actually were in the, in the basketball tournament, but we actually continue through next year. So we'll be in the spring sports like lacrosse and then in the fall sports as well. So we had all of the branding on court and we were throwing to a unique landing page which has an offer which has a six months managed free. So we're looking to see do we drive traffic, did we drive conversion, did we drive pickup of the offer? So we have sort of like layered in here. You've got just your fundamental awareness and impressions and then you have a very specific call to action that we can measure. So we'll be looking at all of that. But also the education videos that we provided that was specifically because the A10 asked us, they said, and we've heard this from other people, we have these athletes who are now making money because of the nil deals and a lot of them just don't have any idea what to do. And we would love if not only you were our sponsor but if you were actually providing education for our athletes who could really use it. So we created 10 videos that are living on this landing page and then we will cut them into commercials and we'll use them as digital advertising at large. But they are on topics like and this gets to Gen Z in Gen Z investors, like how do you manage debt while being an investor? I think a lot of kids. Gen Z, I say kids, but I'm a parent of a Gen Z, I'm a parent of a Gen Zer. So that's my frame. But Gen Gen Z investors are coming into the market with debt. A lot of them have, you know, student loans and there's always been this sort of like monkey on your back. If you have debt, pay down your debt, pay down your credit card debt. And that keeps people from investing and that keeps people from, you know, first Jobs contributing to their 401k and actually doesn't have to be that way. You can have a smart debt down, pay down strategy and get into investing, especially if you have like a 401k with a match. So we were really interested in providing bite size education because there's a lot of like myth out there and we just want to, we just want to get kids on the right track.
- [36:01]
Brent Csutoras
Well, to zoom out, how much do you rely on organic and word of mouth versus paid? I mean these partnerships kind of engender word of mouth and people sharing that sort of thing. But there's also a paid component and then there's just straight paid. Straight paid media.
- [36:14]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, I mean I think word of mouth is very important. Entertainment was a lot easier on word of mouth frankly. It's hard to get people to talk about their, their investing to their friends. But we do have refer friend programs. We do do things that say, you know, share and like. But engagement with an investing app or investing content is going to be different than it would be for something that's just like, you know, just fundamentally more viral. So I don't think we should depend on it. But we definitely care very much about customer sentiment. We do a lot of tracking, like I said, on brand health. We do a lot of surveys to see what people like, don't like. We make sure our NPS is high. Having like fans, people that love your product really helps always. Right.
- [37:04]
Brent Csutoras
For sure. And then I want to talk a little bit about the programmatic side of things. More like how much of the budget is flowing to open web programmatic versus the walled gardens. And is there a reason why you might be leaning more toward one or the other?
- [37:23]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah. When you say walled gardens, do you
- [37:25]
Brent Csutoras
mean like your metas and all of that?
- [37:27]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, yeah. The mix changes. Like we have, we have a pretty, you know, pretty organic flow like as things are, as, as things are performing. But I would say, I would say like a solid 30 plus percent is programmatic. So it's, it's responsive, you know. Okay.
- [37:49]
Brent Csutoras
One other thing I did want to bring up the recent security incident, the data breach where some hackers accessed the personal details of some betterment customers. They were using this fake crypto scam notification. When something like that happens, like especially at a financial company where trust is so important. You were just talking about nps. How does your team have to react to that? Like what's the communication strategy in the first few days?
- [38:14]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, it thinks it's really important. I think it's not an if It's a when, unfortunately. So I think how you respond is very important. So for us, it was about within hours getting a communication out to affected customers, and within days getting the communication out to anyone who's ever been a customer. We didn't just say, okay, if we think that, you know, this, this small group, we went as broad as we could, published a available website page, an incident report page that we've been updating. So transparency was very important. We will be putting out a final security report soon, which, again, will be totally public. So for us, it's about transparency, timeliness, and I think the other thing is it kind of shows you who you are as a company. And I would say as a company, we're incredibly strong. Like, we come together and can handle a crisis. I like, I'm just very proud of how we handled it. So, you know, trust is important. We've been in this for 10 years. We have over a million customers. We have over $65 billion. And, you know, we take that responsibility very seriously.
- [39:26]
Brent Csutoras
Right. Things happen. You have to look it in the eye and. Yeah. And then you move on.
- [39:31]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah.
- [39:32]
Brent Csutoras
So penultimate question for any ad tech vendors that are listening to this podcast. How do you choose who to work with? I'm sure your inbox just, like, explodes daily. Everyone wants a piece of you. They want to run a test with you. And of course, you want to find the most interesting and innovative partners, but you can't possibly test everybody. So, yeah, like, what's. What's some advice? One, what's some advice for how to pitch you? Although I almost fear asking you this question, maybe you should. You should consider how you answer, because you're going to get a lot of email and. Yeah. What you're looking for.
- [40:11]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, it's true. You do get a lot inbound. And like, when we did our A10 announcement, I think one of the things that shows you it had a lot of reach was we almost immediately got inbound from every other league and all the other teams. I think you have to keep it small. You have to keep the list fairly small. It's kind of like we both live in New York City. You've got. You've got limited closet space. You buy a coat, you got to throw a coat out. Like, that's just how it is because you only have so much time and bandwidth. So I would say to, like. Sorry about that. To break. To break through and replace an existing vendor, there needs to be some unique offering. I'm not. It's too difficult, especially because we are regulated. And it's so important to us to have partners that like can work within our regulation and optimize within the regulation that if we were to consider replacing a media partner or a vendor, I would need to understand that the new person was bringing something unique and different. So for example, right now there's a lot of AI tools, a lot that is out there and how do I pick? And we have a lot of AI tools internally already. I want to watch out that we're not buying more tools than we can use. So for me I'm being very cautious. I'm looking at stuff I'm like watching, you know, I watch a demo, go to a website which immediately I'll get a bunch of inbound because people are great ABM marketers. But I'm looking for just like what we provide as a financial services app. I'm looking for something that's going to make my life easier, that's going to make it faster, it's going to make it simpler and like I said, that has some unique quality that I'm not already getting. Why would I find a new sports management partner when I've had great success with the one I'm working with?
- [42:05]
Brent Csutoras
It's funny you say that because I'll write an article about the marketing strategy of like a liquor brand and Suddenly I'll get 15 emails from the PR agencies associated with other brands liquor brand saying, hey, do you want to talk to my guy? And sometimes the answer is is yes. And it's such a pile on if you show any interest. It's almost like being retargeted.
- [42:27]
Kim Rosenblum
Yeah, it's, it is retargeting. And I don't want to imply like we're a closed wall, like we won't work with new people. Obviously, you know, we've, we do all the time. I mentioned we brought in Cross Funnel. We're about to do some magentic advertising. We're looking all the time. But again they have to be like Cross Funnel was a perfect example or X Funnel now at HubSpot where they provided a service that I could not find elsewhere, which was a quick, like a real dashboard evaluating LLM with tactics with like real time tactics on how to address it. I was hearing all of that and going to webinars and learning about like, how do you show up in LLMs? How do you, you know, how do you work with Reddit to improve the LLM? But this particular product kind of pulled it all together in a very simple way. So.
- [43:12]
Brent Csutoras
All right guys, so just make Kim's life easier. That's what you gotta do.
- [43:16]
Kim Rosenblum
That's right. I think that's what all marketing should do, is make people's lives easier.
- [43:20]
Brent Csutoras
Hell, yeah. Well, I have a silly one to bring us home. What's your favorite show on Nick At Night?
- [43:25]
Kim Rosenblum
Oh, well, you know, I worked on Nick at Night very early on, and I got the opportunity to meet all sorts of celebrities. Like, all sorts. I've met Dick Van Dyke. I've met Mary Tyler Moore. I've met Betty White. I. I've met a lot of the classic stars. So they're all very near and dear to me. I will say. I guess right now, not on Nick at Night, but on TV Land, Seinfeld is running. I actually watched Seinfeld on TV Land over the weekend. And when I was at TV Land, Seinfeld was still like a primetime hit. So I'm going to have to just go with the classic Seinfeld.
- [44:08]
Brent Csutoras
Well, what's the deal with LLMs? So.
- [44:12]
Kim Rosenblum
Exactly. Yes.
- [44:13]
Brent Csutoras
What a silly way to end. But thank you for the time. This was a good one.
- [44:17]
Kim Rosenblum
Thanks, Alison. It was really fun. Nice to talk to you. Appreciate it.