The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – February 2026
The ProFundCom team has curated the best events, opinions, insights and resources relating to digital marketing from the previous month and looking forward to the month ahead. The team not only look to bring you the best articles for investment managers and hedge funds but also articles, in general, that marketers find useful.
Post of the Month
ProFundCom – Why Is AI Failing Fund Marketing
The artificial intelligence bubble feels fit to burst
Digitalisation has been lightning-fast this side of the millennium, and AI represents one of its most seismic underground to mainstream hits. It’s not just a talking point: it’s a data processing behemoth with a predictive analytical mind beyond comprehension.
So much so that an estimated $35 billion has been invested in fintech AI applications. The returns of which, however, have been diminishing. For all its positives for personalisation, automated outreach and data segmentation, funds are struggling to see how it empowers their marketers to set their offerings apart. Investment is a people’s industry requiring customer psychology, storytelling and relationship building to excel – areas where AI capability is constantly playing catch up.
Given these costly moves the financial industry has taken and the technology’s growing sophistication, AI is not going anywhere.
In this comprehensive report, we’ll cross-examine why firms are not currently harnessing its forecasted ‘revolutionary’ use, citing data quality, lack of expertise and contextual understanding, availability, over-reliance on automations, and ever-looming financial compliance, which are getting stricter with AI’s own legal hurdles.
Beyond the pitfalls that have claimed early adopters, we’ll also offer constructive ways to implement AI that do have proven marketing outcomes and leave room for the most powerful factor for decision-making: authentic, human creativity.
Marketing Week – Ignore anyone who tells you to forget about targeting
If you are any kind of marketer with any kind of budget you’ve recently been told not to worry about targeting. Your digital agency mate or a salesperson from one of the mega platforms explained that you don’t need to worry about all the old-fashioned target market stuff anymore. Just handover your ad, drop it down the digital mineshaft and through the power of Big Data, amazing AI and the magical healing power of algorithms your ad will find its perfect consumers while you sleep or watch 80s movies or gaze out of the window and wonder why you have a niggling feeling of despair.
The first time you heard this recommendation you probably thought to yourself, “That sounds like shitfuckery”. And there is a good reason to think this. It is shitfuckery. And of the highest possible order. And if you are well trained or simply relatively intelligent you should have become suddenly aware that the red warning lights of marketing bullshit were (once again) flashing around you.
Your cynicism should be prompted by the fact that these are the very same companies and people who – only a few years ago – extolled the exact opposite approach. Remember when it was all about personalisation? Micro-targeting? When it was super-granular? Your digital ad was not just targeted, oh no, it was ‘hyper-targeted’.
ProFundCom – Digital Marketing Review of the Top 100 Hedge Funds 2026
It’s our pleasure to present ProFundCom’s fourth annual digital marketing review of the world’s 100 largest hedge funds.
We’ve refreshed the criteria this year, analysing the websites of these top hedge funds according to UX and design, content marketing, social media, and products and services. When executed effectively, these core marketing strategies can significantly broaden a business’s reach, attract new leads, and drive substantial growth in assets under management.
This year’s rankings have shifted as some firms strengthened their marketing efforts and climbed several places, while others slipped after being outperformed by competitors. Eight firms achieved standout results, scoring 80% or higher against our assessment criteria. 53 hedge funds reached scores of at least 50%, while 47 fell below the halfway mark.
Notably, 12 firms scored 25% or less, indicating significant room for improvement in their websites.
For these major hedge funds, there is untapped potential to better leverage their digital marketing, an opportunity that could translate into meaningful growth in assets under management. Improving website navigation, content marketing, or social media presence often requires only modest changes. Small adjustments could substantially enhance many of the sites we reviewed, boosting ProFundCom rankings and widening digital reach.
This report highlights practical digital marketing insights designed to help generate new leads and support AuM growth.
Living Group – Living Ratings of Asset Managers 2025
Following on from last year’s theme, “Building Brand, Building Reputation,” this year’s focus is all about amplifying your brand — ensuring it’s not only visible but also meaningful, differentiated, and future-ready.
Over the past year, we’ve seen an unprecedented level of brand activity across the sector. Around 10% of the Top 100 firms have undergone a rebrand or repositioning, while many others have launched high-profile brand campaigns aimed at sharpening their market presence and reinforcing their purpose.At the same time, the rise of Private Markets and the growing democratisation of alternative investments has signalled a new era of investing. This shift has expanded the landscape, bringing more private equity and alternatives firms into the Top 100, alongside a wave of new partnerships between traditional asset managers and private equity players.
Such rapid business and sector transformation demands brand transformation. The question for firms now is clear: how do you position and amplify your brand so it remains relevant, distinctive, and memorable — not just for existing audiences, but for the next generation of investors?
Alpha Agency – Rebrand or refresh: which do you need?
A lot of clients have approached us recently with queries that amount to a variation on a theme.
They are phrased in different ways:
-“We’ve been around for 20 years now, a new CEO has recently been appointed and we are not sure our brand is fit for purpose for the direction of the business today – can you help?”
-“The market is shifting and the messaging we developed five years ago is being tested and found wanting, but we don’t want to unduly pivot without doing our due diligence first. What would you suggest?”
-“I’ve just joined the firm, they did a ‘rebrand’ three years ago, but it was never fully cascaded across client touchpoints. There is no appetite among stakeholders to fully revisit the messaging, but I don’t know how to make it work for all our capabilities and audiences, can you support?”
-“We are entering a couple of new markets and want to be sure we are articulating our brand in a way that will resonate with these audiences – can you tell us how you would approach this?”
Ultimately, they all boil down to the same thing – people who don’t want to do a full rebrand but for whatever reason need to, or are willing to, do a brand “refresh”.
Peregrine – The Global 100 Asset Management Marketing Report 2025
This is now the 8th year that we have put out our annual analysis of the world’s largest asset managers. In that time, we have had thousands of downloads, been asked to share our findings at many conferences, run more than a few strategy sessions, had our research cited by the biggest management consulting firms, and have been covered by the key media in our space. But more than anything else, we have valued the myriad conversations it has led to with asset managers of every size. It has helped us develop and refine our thinking about how to build, evolve and protect investment firms’ brands.
With that said, nothing stands still, nor should it. Which is why we are very excited to unveil a refresh to our thinking for this year’s Global 100. The Brand Diagnostic will, of course, remain – it is an invaluable tool that helps us benchmark whether our clients are building their brands. We have always wanted to find a more methodical, more evidence-based way to help firms consider their competitor positioning, and now we can.
So, with this year’s Global 100, please welcome Peregrine Frame, our new analytical tool to help asset managers assess how distinctive their positioning is, how common, or otherwise, their key messages are. It is already clear that firms that score better for the distinctiveness of their positioning are more likely to be among the biggest winners when it comes to growing AUM. We hope you’ll find this as useful as we do.
The ProFundCom Digital Marketing Benchmark provides real-time access to all of ProFundCom’s digital marketing data from over the last 20 years, giving users the ability to compare how their marketing campaigns are performing versus sector peers. Further details of how other organisations are carrying out similar processes and the associated results are also available. The anonymised data is over 10 terabytes in size (which interestingly is the amount of data produced by the Hubble Space Telescope per year!) and will be split into different industry sectors as well as AuM. Access ProFundCom Benchmarking here
As a fund marketer, testing your email marketing campaigns on different devices and email clients is one of the most important tasks. Couple that with compliance, avoiding the JUNK folder, and avoiding getting added to blacklists. What most fund marketers have found is that generic mailing platforms just don’t have that ability. Whilst ProFundCom has this built into our platform, we have made this available as a free service if you are a financial marketer. If you provide us with the HTML in the form below we will run the following tests on the email
Instant Previews – Instantly see how your email will appear on over 70 different email clients Instant Blacklist Report – See whether your sending address is blacklisted on popular domain blacklists Instant SPAM Check – Rate how likely your email will end up in Junk folders Instant Compliance – Compare your email’s content against compliance heuristics
