20 Content Highlights To Remember From 2012

I’ll never cease to marvel at the power of the written word. As just one recent example, I’m barely into Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, and Jobs’ life path has already been influenced by articles that appeared in two magazines (one in Esquire and the other in Popular Mechanics).

Content (to include more than just the written word in 2012) can be just so relevant, so provocative, so entertaining that it has an impact on us. We email a link to it, we tweet about it, we mention it in real life conversations, we conduct research based on it, we remember it.

The following is a list of 20 content highlights that I’ll take from 2012.

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Videos Humanize Mutual Fund, ETF Firms—All That's Needed Now Is Viewers

When was the last time you went to the movies? And by that I mean, when did you last watch an asset manager video that you didn't have a hand in producing?

If it's been a while or...never, you are not alone as mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms' videos continue to languish in obscurity. While other brands in other industries consistently report success with video, investment firm-sponsored videos do well to attract three-digit view totals on YouTube. (See a lonnng Rock The Boat Marketing post on this from June of last year.)

But low viewership is not stopping firms from elevating their art, as this selection of recent videos suggests.

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Asset Managers Start To Say It With Pictures

“Hey, I read your ____.”

That would be the highest compliment that a family member could ever give me. After years of writing for various publications and companies, I’m still waiting to hear that a relative other than my sainted mother (she’d suffer through anything) read something that I wrote.

And yet the other day, I happened to mention something that I saw on an asset manager site to my recent college graduate niece. “Oh, I’d like to see that,” said Katy. And, the knife turned when she texted me later to remind me to send her the link.

Huh.

If you’re in the words business, as many asset management firms are, change is in the air. Signs are that the rest of the world, my family included, wants to see more than they want to read.

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3 Examples Of Award-Winning Interactive Work

People can be cranky about marketing awards. As in: “Well, we’re not doing this to win awards, you know.”

But I happen to think that awards serve a purpose. They encourage the competitive spirit that can lead to winning not just awards but business, they put a bounce in the step of the marketing teams and—most relevant for this post—they give the rest of us a glimpse of what others judge to be the best, even trend-setting work.

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What's New On Mutual Fund, ETF Websites

I wince every time I see how prominent “Social Media” is in the tag cloud on this blog. There’s more to digital marketing strategy than just social, obviously. Let me make up for it a little today by sticking closer to home and calling your attention to some progressive information design showing up on a few mutual fund and ETF Websites.

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