Episode Details

There are few things in life that are not volatile. The stock market rises and falls, much like a pendulum swinging from left to right. Crypto is viewed as a rocket ship, but it’s returns remain mostly inconsistent, and the housing market has seen its fair share of crashes over the years. But if you’re looking for one asset class that bucks the trend when it comes to volatility, fine art might just be it.

For centuries art has been seen as an avenue for the rich and famous to flex their wealth, but Masterworks believes it’s business model of allowing everyday consumers to invest in multi-billion dollar pieces of art, is shattering that glass ceiling and democratizing art for all.

“We consider ourselves fiduciaries or financial advisors. We're doing that because art is a very confusing and brand new asset class. We're the only ones enabling access to this $1.7 trillion market. From a suitability standpoint, to let someone Yolo their life savings into a Banksy is not something that we want our customers to do. We don't think it makes sense for someone that has a $5 million retirement portfolio to put in a hundred dollars. So we'll tell that person, just keep your money; keep the cash; put it in stocks. So we're really getting people, not only to understand what is art as an asset class, why is art important, but to make sure they're investing responsibly and investing a part of their portfolio, that actually makes sense.”

Michael Wenner is VP of Marketing and Director of Business Development at Masterworks, a platform that lets everyday consumers invest in pieces of art such as Banksy, Kaws, and Basquiat. Michael joined me on this episode of Marketing Trends to discuss how Masterworks is using centuries of data to its advantage to not just identify which pieces of art the company invests in, but also why they are opening that data up to everyone. Michael also dives into why he is bullish on content marketing, and how Masterworks views itself more as a financial institution rather than an art gallery.  Enjoy this episode.

Main Takeaways

• Data Strategy: When you need to get the attention of your prospective audience in a big way, you need to offer them something that is useful to them. Creating a large set of data about your field or industry that you can leverage to engage clients and leave a good impression with them is a great way to make a splash. 
• Marketing a new asset class: Education is the keystone of grounding a good marketing campaign for a product or service that doesn’t have a market yet. You’ve got to get creative and think about what you can do to bring value to your potential consumers.
• Content Marketing Doesn’t Work: There is an argument to be made that annoying your customers, and prospective customers with an array of content emails, that can trigger bounce rates to go up, is not worth that loss. Those email addresses represent dollars and you should take every opportunity you have in front of your customer to serve them with your products. The most effective approach can be that of brute-force. Be direct with your potential clients; do whatever it takes to get their emails.

Key Quotes

“We always talk about how Facebook it's such a great platform, that people have given so much information about themselves. LinkedIn is giving you much more relevant information. You can tell exactly how wealthy and how successful someone is. So we don't really do role-based targeting or job-based targeting, but it's really incredible that by what you're able to do by brute force. [Linkedin’s] technology's obviously not as good as Facebook, but you can figure out how to set up targeting campaigns. You can get to the wealthiest, most successful people on earth. It’s going to cost you, but if you can convince them it's the best way to do it.” 

“We consider ourselves fiduciaries or financial advisors.