Joe AnthonyJoe Anthony

A lot has changed in the 22 years since I started my career in public relations, but we’ve always relied on curious, motivated, intellectually hungry people who live and breathe in the world of finance.

Our clients—and the journalists we work with every day—have little patience for agencies that aren’t on their wavelength. Their time is precious and their attention is finite. Many of our clients in the Registered Investment Advisor space have their sights trained on building growth flywheels and reaching for the one big advantage that institutional incumbents still hold over them: national, instantaneous brand recognition.

And on the media side? It’s no secret that the media landscape has changed. Newsrooms are shrinking and many displaced reporters now leverage their expertise to create subscription newsletters for their followers. On top of that, many forward-looking financial platforms are becoming de facto media destinations in their own right. Financial services PR agencies need to meet media professionals where they are and work harder than ever to help tell the stories of their clients.

Everyone in this industry needs people who can read the room. There are more than six PR professionals for every journalist. Spray-and-pray pitching doesn’t work. Scroll down the social media timeline of any given reporter and you’ll find someone dunking on off-target outreach or an email from a PR novice over their skis who forgot to take the placeholders out of their copy-pasted pitch. And our clients have better things to do with their professional lives than re-explain the core tenets of their business to bewildered newbies on every campaign call.

This article is featured in O'Dwyer's Aug. Financial PR/IR & Professional Servcies PR Magazine

Our success depends on people who know this industry inside and out. To that end, we’ve taken a page from the financial services industry playbook and pursued strategic growth when we find people who think like we do. Our recent acquisition of BackBay Communications underscores the power of human talent. BackBay brought over a litany of media relations and content marketing professionals with compelling experience and expertise. Veterans of the New York Times, American Banker, S&P, Celent and other prestigious financial PR agencies join our existing stable of experienced, results-driven professionals. They reinforce our strengths and bring their own specialties to the table. With BackBay, we have the reach, the capabilities and the relationships to support the ambitions of our clients on a whole new scale, no matter what the future brings.

We’ve been at this long enough to see that not all M&A deals are created equal. We’ve had front-row seats to financial services acquisitions that genuinely synthesize different work cultures and fields of expertise to create something greater than the sum of their parts. On the flip side, we’ve also seen acquisitions that turn out like Wile E. Coyote after he finally catches the Road Runner … in other words, they had no idea what to do next. They lurch around until the principals quietly file out the door and land somewhere else or create competing ventures.

We found kindred spirits. We wanted people who have put in the time and shoe-leather work to earn the respect of financial professionals. This industry is a big tent, and no single person can serve every corner of it. We can give our talent the capacity to lean into what they do best, and they, in turn, allow us to compete and win in new arenas.

That depth matters, because this industry is too big to tell just one story.

Not everyone is trying to dethrone the wirehouses. We see more firms define victory on their own terms by focusing on niche markets, targeting specific slices of potential clients and understanding them better than anyone else. We see private wealth firms and family offices working to stand out with blends of concierge service and ancillary offerings that were nearly nonexistent 10 or even five years ago. Financial services PR needs to equip itself to understand and tell these emerging stories as well. Similar examples of this evolution dot the landscape in private markets, asset management, wealthtech and more.

I want to note that our doubling down on human talent is happening alongside our agency’s heavy investment in generative AI technology. We learned very early that tech innovation doesn’t have to come at the cost of human talent and relationships.

Again, there’s no shortcut to relationship-building. We’re not using chatbots to spam reporters with generative gibberish. Instead, we have developed and tested our own best practices and safety measures. Our entire agency goes through AI training sessions twice every week, and many of those sessions are led by our own account teams who understand this technology’s strengths, its limits and, in many cases, have developed their own custom workflows and apps to bring new efficiencies to their work.

This is what I mean by giving human professionals the resources and the mandate to go forth and kick ass. We’re reaping the benefits of a work culture that encourages PR professionals to do their own research, find what moves the needle and share what they’ve learned for everyone’s benefit.

No matter what the future brings, PR lives and dies on meaningful connections and media relations. We’re here to help journalists do their work and to help our clients share their stories with the world. The tools and techniques we use will certainly change in the years to come. But the right people, working together, can rise to the challenge with authenticity, trust and responsive service.

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Joe Anthony, President and Co-Owner of Gregory FCA, has led the firm’s financial services unit since 2003.