THE SHORT LIST: PROFILE
Water & Wall Group
Year Agency Founded: 2012
AGENCY LEADERSHIP
President
Scott Sunshine/Andrew Healy (Co-CEOs)
Business Development Director
(212) 625-2364
SERVICES PROVIDED
Branding, Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer, Content Services, Creative, Design, Digital Marketing, Event Marketing, Film/Video Production, Public Relations, SEO, Strategy
AGENCY DATA
Full time employees: 10
Part time employees: 5
95% Financial clients by billing
95% financial clients by roster
Current financial/insurance clients: State Street Global Advisors, S&P Select Sector SPDRS, NEPC, American Beacon Funds, AxiomSL, WBI Investments
Financial/insurance clients within the past three years: State Street Global Advisors, XE.com (leading payments/money transfer co), Investor Stewardship Group ($22 trillion governance effort led by BlackRock, T. Rowe, MFS, Vanguard, SSGA, CalSTRS, etc.), WBI Investments, AxiomSL (global fintech leader), Snowden Lane Partners (launched by former Merrill execs and among fastest growing RIAs). American Beacon Funds ($65 billion asset management firm), WorldFirst (payments/fintech provider)
AWARDS
Gramercy Most Valuable Partners in Financial Marketing
Fund Action’s PR/Marketing Firm of the Year for ETF Issuers
2018 SABRE awards for Best Meme/Viral Campaign & Best in Social Good & Public Service
plus several pending awards for our work on the SSGA Fearless Girl campaign.
PRESS AND ARTICLES
Business Insider's article on Fearless Girl, which we secured. To date, it's been viewed nearly 1.4 million times, which their editor has said makes it one of the most read Business Insider articles in its history.
We're the sole content marketing partner to NEPC, an investment consultant with $960 billion in total institutional AUA. They showcase all of the content we create for them on their Insights page, and distribute this across all of their marketing channels including email marketing, social media, paid media, website, etc.
ETF Securities YouTube page. ETF Securities is a London-based provider of commodities ETFs which it sells through U.S. financial advisors. The company turned to Water & Wall Group to help them reach this audience and the end investor. Water & Wall develop an educational content program comprising a series of seven one-minute videos, sell sheets and infographics to reach these audiences. Engagement has been high, particularly across the videos, which were shared directly with the advisors, and uploaded to YouTube.
AGENCY VALUE PROPOSITION
Water & Wall Group is a collective of highly-engaged strategists and creatives who help financial companies resolve business issues, facilitate growth, and drive brand engagement. We accomplish this with pointed messaging, thoughtful narratives, carefully-crafted content, and sage advice.
ABOUT THIS AGENCY
From a philosophical viewpoint, Water and Wall maintains the most stringent standards in both its external and internal relationships, since these are essential to the firm’s success. We operate with a sense of competitive urgency, recognizing that our clients have entrusted us with their brands during an extremely challenging and changing marketing environment, for which we must continuously remain far ahead of the curve be good stewards. When we launched in 2012, we set out to construct a new type of agency that marries the best elements of public relations, traditional marketing services, creative and compelling content creation and digital marketing distribution. Five years later, we’ve grown from an idea on a napkin to a multi-million dollar business serving clients across the entire financial spectrum and around globe.
AGENCY INNOVATION IN FINANCIAL MARKETING
Never content to adhere to a “business as usual” philosophy, Water & Wall continually reinvents itself to ensure we stay ahead of industry trends in a way that most directly benefits our financial clients. For example, several years ago we transformed ourselves from a pure play media relations firm to one that imbued our DNA with digital marketing, content creation (video, audio, design), and paid media skills. We put all our employees through training so they’re conversant in today’s digital language, built a creative
department to develop visual storytelling deliverables to complement our existing editorial expertise, and introduced video creation to our clients as a way of reaching their audiences in new, measurable and effective ways.
AGENCY CASE STUDIES
SSGA Fearless Girl
On March 7, 2017, Wall Street was brought to a humbled silence, not by a global leader’s visit, or a hot IPO. Instead, the world’s financial capital was brought to a standstill by a bronze statue, barely 50 inches tall. Installed in the dead of night before International Women’s Day, State Street Global Advisor’s Fearless Girl stands arms akimbo, Peter Pan-style, facing the iconic Charging Bull and not backing down. The Water & Wall team was proud to be the lead agency supporting this campaign that continues to this day. Immediately following its installation, our team raced back to the office – coffees in hand – and helped ignite a global media frenzy rarely seen in financial services. The coverage sparked meaningful dialogue about the importance of gender diversity and women in leadership, a social theme that has dominated the 2017 landscape. We helped secure more than 2,400 pieces of media coverage, including appearances on ABC TV, Bloomberg TV, Cheddar, CNBC, CNN, and thousands of articles in traditional and online media such as ESPN, Forbes, Institutional Investor, MarketWatch, Nightly Business Review, People, Reuters, Washington Post. Our Business Insider coverage, alone, secured 1.4 million views, making it one of their most widely-engaged articles to-date.
ammunition, leading to an increase in their US AUM.
CONTACT
Web Address
Scott Sunshine
(617) 692-2171
Address
Water & Wall Group
19 West 21st Street, Suite 1202, New York, NY 10010
ETF Securities
When ETF Securities, a predominantly UK-based commodities ETF provider, wanted to launch a marketing campaign targeting financial advisors here in the U.S., they turned to Water & Wall for support. We have the deepest level of ETF experience in the agency landscape, representing dozens of issuers and more than $250 billion in total ETF AUM over our careers, and have been the domestic agency partner for countless international brands looking to plant their flag in the States (Barclays Wealth, Robecco, Henderson Global Advisors, etc.). After conducting a strategic assessment of ETF Securities’ business, we launched a content marketing campaign to showcase the firm’s thought leadership and expertise in the niche commodity space. We created a series of visual story assets, from infographics to marketing collateral, which were predominantly distributed through email marketing and the client’s website. We complemented that with a series of videos to put a face to the brand and further drive engagement across their social properties, supported with a paid media strategy to boost its reach. In total, we created more than 30 pieces of content over two quarters that served as the client’s main marketing ammunition, leading to an increase in their US AUM.