Almost every media plan is built on the same unit: impressions. But an impression only tells you how many times your ad was served. It tells you nothing about the room it walked into and the people in it.

Picture the room

So picture the room. On a generalist feed, an ad for your investment product lands between "how do I get red wine out of the carpet", a cat meme, someone's weekend baking, and a cure for a hangover. It flickers past. The scroll resumes. Back to the cat memes. A careful case for a considered financial product gets three-quarters of a second in a room where nobody came to think about money.
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And it's often worse than being distracted. In the ANA's landmark study of programmatic buying, only around 36 pence of every pound reached the audience it was meant for. The rest leaked away: to fees, to bots, to made-for-advertising sites built for no one at all. With generalist impressions, you're buying a crowded room, and half the time there’s no one relevant in it.

A different room

Now picture a different room. Someone opens Finimize. Not by accident, and not for the cat memes. They've opted in – deliberately – because they want to make more informed investment decisions. That's the only reason they're there. And that means every impression in that room is a high-intent one.
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Cost-per-impression stats, then, can mislead you: an impression from someone who's never invested, isn't in the market for your product, and has never heard your name can be very cheap.

It's also useless. Cheap and useless travel together more often than the industry admits – and cheap is not the same as efficient. The price of an impression only means something once you know what the impression is worth.

Who’s in the room?

That all being said, here’s who’s in the Finimize room: high-intent, high-value modern retail investors. Over 60% of Finimize members have been investing for five years or more, and more than 20% have at least $100,000 to put to work in the year ahead. 

And they pay attention: Finimize members drive an over-50% email open rate, and 80% content completion rates across our text and audio content published on web and in our app – more than double the average for content published by wealth management firms. 

Finimizers turn their attention into action, too: for example, 75% say they “invest smarter” thanks to Finimize, and around 40% of the people who come to a Finimize event tell us they went on to make an investment decision.

The numbers hold up

Our members engage like that whether or not there’s an offer or incentive – they just want to understand the markets and invest better. All of that’s supercharged when there is something in it for them – when you put something useful and relevant in front of an audience that's already paying attention.
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Some of those figures come from surveys of a slice of the community, but it's a big slice – thousands of investors, several times a year. And there’s proof that isn't from a survey at all: some 60% of the financial services brands that partner with us come back and do it again, some of the biggest names in the world among them. It goes without saying that nobody repeats that which doesn't work.‍

Ask what kind, not just how many

So next time you're weighing channels, go one level deeper: ask what kind of impressions as well as how many, whether the person on the other side chose to be there, whether they care, whether they're even the investor you're trying to reach. Ours are – engaged, high-intent, high-value, and hard to find anywhere else.