ANZ Turns On To TV

A cursory examination of the many social networking websites around the world reveals financial planners everywhere are taking up the challenge of making the most of the internet.

Type in ‘financial planning’, or ‘insurance sales’ into any social networking search engine and you will find ads, video newsletters and video blogs from planners the world over.

Those who have moved quickly to embrace these new potential distribution mediums are trying their best to build a brand for themselves, raise their levels of customer intimacy and to promote themselves as being special, different and better… and therefore valuable.

With the advent of websites such as FaceBook, YouTube and MySpace there is a growing belief it is easier for professionals to become relatively intimate with people, and these sites reveal enough about a person to let others know quickly if they are honest, talented and worth pursuing.

This sharing of emotion and identification of need and the personalisation that takes place on the web now it seems attracted the attention of the people over at ANZ Financial planning with the launch of ANZ TV.

ANZ TV is a series of short streaming videos of financial planning professionals and ANZ staff discussing a range of issues, including changes to super and people should see a planner.

See it here:

By putting opinion and relevant information out to the public via streaming webcast, ANZ and other groups that have also embraced the medium is creating an interesting effect.

It’s humanising the bank – by making the issues about people and delivering them by people with faces, expressions, intonation and personalities it makes it easier for people to form an attachment to a group.

The technology, which is essentially the same as the slivercasting revolution which has taken the web by storm in the USA as a specialist, low cost media service, is as yet slightly immature in Australia.

It remains to be seen if companies here are going to do more than push product ideas and solutions and allow themselves as institutions to build human brands which consumers can find affection for, think are intelligent and form a genuine relationship with?