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Phoenix Finance is a comprehensive intelligent financial service platform established by Phoenix TV Group for global Chinese. The Asian Banker presented the award "Digital Wealth Management Service of the Year in China" to Phoenix Finance for its excellence achievements in products and services, technological empowerment, social impacts and other aspects in the field of wealth management.

The Global Wealth and Society Awards are known as the "Oscar in Finance" and "Digital Wealth Management Service of the Year in China" is the only award in digital wealth management area. Stringent evaluation rules with highest international standards are followed by the Asian Banker under the Global Wealth and Society Awards programme. The Wealth and Society and the International Advisory Council evaluated institutions' products and services, social influence, staff skills, technology and efficiency, value of franchise, financial performance and achievements in the year. Phoenix Finance successfully undergone these stringent evaluations and became the only winner of this award not only for its innovation and development in digital wealth management services but also for its outstanding comprehensive strength.

Mr. Vince Zhang, president of Phoenix Finance, and Mr. Bo Liang, general manager of the Wealth Management Center of Phoenix Finance attended the summit. Mr. Zhang gave a keynote speech and participated in a round-table discussion entitled "Wealth and technology: opportunities and prospects". He said that China will become the largest market with per capita investable assetsexceeding two trillion yuan by 2020, and most high-net-wealth users will choose mobile applicationsfor wealth management, which provides the important development base for China's intelligent wealth management.

According to the official profile from Phoenix Finance, its main target user group is emerging wealthy group whose investable assets are between 300,000 to 10 million yuan. Phoenix Finance has formed a blueprint in intelligent finance field since 2015. And up to now, it has successfully established a set of cutting-edge Fintech-based intelligent technological architecture with the implement of big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other high technologies. In its wealth management business, in order to provide users customized wealth management services, Phoenix Finance has produced many application-level products and services such as smart wealth management product "Phoenix Accurate", fully-automatic trading strategy product "Magic Mirror Robo-advisor", and intelligent news analysis engine "Fengming Intelligent Information". All these products and services have greatly improved the company's service efficiency as well.

Wealth management business of Phoenix Finance adopts the Internet-led online marketing and servicing model and provides offline services to perfect the online ones. Meanwhile, it establishes "life-cycle value management system"and sets up "Prestige Club" to meet users' demands at different wealth management processes with various products and portfolios.

Except from an honor for Phoenix Finance to win this award, it also indicates the Asian bankers' prediction on development trend of digital wealth management and recognition and appreciation of representative institution's innovation value. In the future, competition in the wealth management market will be fiercer, and investors' demands will be more diverse, so technology and services will be the decisive winning point in the competition between wealth management institutions.

SOURCE Phoenix Finance

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Phoenix Finance wins the Asian Banker's "Digital Wealth Management Service of the Year in China" Award - PRNewswire

Long before Ole Miss announced the hiring of Lane Kiffin as its football coach Saturday, the communications arm of the athletic department in Oxford had a plan.

Its not enough these days to simply push news via your social channels.

No, in todays day and age of social media, marketing and communications departments strive for creative and eye-catching ways to deliver their messages.

So, if Kiffin being hired was one of the top news stories of the weekend in the SEC, then the way Ole Miss delivered that message was a close second.

The days leading up to the announcement were filled with reports the former Florida Atlantic head coach was headed to Arkansas.

On Friday night reports shifted their focus to Oxford.

By then, the social media team at Ole Miss was ready. On Saturday, it was clear Kiffin was headed to Ole Miss, and the timing of the announcement was to take place after Kiffins Owls faced UAB for the Conference USA title.

What came next was a well-orchestrated and planned execution of a series of tweets that kept Rebels fans wanting more. The tweets were patient, clever with just the right hint of a tease, leaving people wanting more. And, for good measure, the tweets struck the right chord with pop culture references.

Its always a balancing act with major announcements, Ole Miss associate athletic director for football Kyle Campbell told AL.com. In the industry today, an announcement can often come immediately after the decision, which leaves little prep time for content. As a result, you have to hedge your bets sometimes and start working on graphics, videos and press releases before a final decision has been made.

As indications started to lean more toward coach Kiffin late Friday, our staff began a creative brainstorm that went round the clock until Saturdays announcement. Once we got the final confirmation on Saturday that the announcement would come at the conclusion of the Conference USA Championship Game, our team laid out a content schedule to generate the most excitement while still complying with the agreed upon communications timeline.

The staff included Micah Ginn, Stewart Pirani, Seth Austin, Will Day and Scott Wyant from the productions team; Brad Sheffield, Adam Kuffner and Alex Sims from the communications team; and Paris Buchanan and Jason List from the marketing staff. In short, it was a group effort.

At 2:28 p.m. Saturday, it started. It was a simple tweet of a GIF, showing white smoke. The white smoke, of course, is a tip of the cap to a papal conclave in which a new pope has been chosen. In this case, Ole Miss had a new coach, but no information was given.

We use the digital platform Slack in the daily communication between our Communications, Productions and Marketing units, and it allows us to be in constant ideation mode and spitball creative content, said Campbell, who added it was known within the department the Kiffin deal was done at that point. The white smoke was an idea that materialized from our group discussions Friday night, and as plans became more concrete, we landed on that as the first content to tease the announcement.

Forty minutes later, Ole Miss tweeted out a second GIF of a steam locomotive flying down the tracks. For the uninitiated, it was the first clue of who Ole Miss coach would be. The reference was to the Lane Train, a nod to Kiffin.

It was definitely hard, Campbell said of not just announcing the news. We have a passionate, motivated staff, and we want our content to be bold and setting the tone on social media. However, they are also professionals, and when a situation is fluid, they understand to show restraint until the appropriate time.

Still, the tweet has more than 1.6 thousand likes. Ole Miss had the football-watching social media audience on the hook with its first two tweets. Surely, the announcement was coming next, right?

Not yet.

The social media team had one more tease in store, which not only went after Ole Miss football fan base but also after fans of one of the most trending topics on social media over the past few weeks: Baby Yoda.

Baby Yoda is the younger version of the famed Star Wars character, which has become a world-wide hit. The adorable character of The Mandalorian, a Disney+ series, has taken the country by storm. Ole Miss social media team, in a brilliant move, used Baby Yoda and The Mandalorian for the final tease of the reveal.

The social media team synced a popular scene from the show with Quad City DJs 1996 hip hop hit Cmon N Ride it (The Train), yet another reference to the Lane Train. Fifty-eight minutes later, the third communication from Ole Miss was tweeted.

The video took social media by storm, being viewed more than 95,000 times.

Stewart Pirani, who is in his final days on our productions team before beginning a new job in the MLS, left us with that little gift, Campbell said. We have been extremely blessed with creative minds like Stewart in our department, and they bring so many different perspectives and talents to the table. We have content creators that can produce the long-form storytelling that has been so successful on our weekly television show The Season on ESPNU, and at the same time, they can generate funny shorts like the Yoda clip that can quickly go viral on social media.

Fewer than 30 minutes later, the official announcement was tweeted.

By Sunday, Ole Miss official announcement had been viewed more than 1.1 million times.

All of our content was very well received, Campbell said. The social media discussion surrounding coach Kiffin started to really bubble up Friday night, and I think our creative teasers and hype video on Saturday helped further drive the excitement of our fans.

Mark Heim is a sports reporter for The Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Mark_Heim.

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How Ole Miss won Internet with Lane Kiffin, Baby Yoda and The Mandalorian - AL.com

Ally Financial Chief Marketing and Public Relations Officer Andrea Brimmer likes to refer to the companys brand as a weapon. If so, its a weapon of mass seduction.

Since its founding as a category disrupter a decade ago, Ally has generated more than $100 billion in deposits, doubled its brand value and commanded a 90 percent satisfaction rate in a category that normally ranks in the mid-30 range. Ally is now one of the five fastest-growing banks in the world, according to The Financial Brand, and was named Money magazines best online bank in 2019 for the second consecutive year.

Brimmer and her team accomplished all this with only a 2 percent share of voice in a category that spends $5 billion annually with a laser-sharp marketing message: We are an unrelenting ally for consumers.

SuperchargingIts been their strategy for a while, but in the last year-and-a-half, Andrea and her team have really supercharged it, says Jess Greenwood, global chief marketing officer at R/GA, Allys digital agency. They are making sure that they are doubling down on their product and whats true about it: that their customer service is exceptional and they really do put people first.

Launched in 2009 near the end of the Great Recession, Ally sent shockwaves through the category by pioneering 24/7 online banking, eschewing fees and encouraging consumers to (gasp!) rate banks as they do sushi restaurants. But that first-mover advantage waned as other financial institutions jumped into online banking and the downturn ended.

Their voice, which was very dramatic and differentiated in 2008, became a bit less pronounced, says Avi Dan, principal at Avidan Strategies, which was retained last year to help the company review agencies. He said the process was remarkable on several counts. First, Ally paid the shops for participating. And it zero-based the process, he says, so that within the space of four months Brimmer and her team conducted not just one but three reviews, eventually tapping Anomaly for creative, R/GA for digital and Mediacom for media.

The pitchAnomaly founding partner Carl Johnson says the shop normally turns down 75 percent of pitches that come its way, but went after Ally because it was drawn to the banks ambition, which he says matched its own. They understand really important things like the link between creativity and effectiveness, he says. They know creative work that engages people more, that disrupts people more, can be more effective work.

Anomalys first campaign for Ally last year was an open letter to America. It consisted of the headline Your bank makes you followed by the scarlet-faced cursing emoji. We talked about how you need to start looking around, says Brimmer, you need to pay attention to your money and ask your friends, ask the internet, and we think youll find us. Then a week later we launched a cash promotion where we were paying a 1 percent bonus on top of our existing savings rate. She says the goal was to generate a billion dollars in additional deposits, but we ended up in two weeks generating over $2 billion in additional deposits and 74,000 new accounts opened, which was almost double the previous quarter.

Doing it rightIts worth noting that Ally dropped rates four this year in alignment with the Federal Reserve, and has still retained a 90 percent positive sentiment rating, says Brimmer. Just as we tell people when we raise the rate, we tell them when we cut it, she says. If you are going to have a tagline like Do it right, you have to do it in the good and in the bad.

The company has also been a proponent of using games to teach financial literacy and this year ran a Monopoly program, recently turning six U.S. cities into live virtual reality game boards. Clues to game pieces were seeded on a special website. Brimmer says 400,000 people played, the company collected 100,000 new prospect emails and there were 1.2 million visits to the website.

But Allys most outstanding characteristic might well be its humanity. It has underscored its do right mantra in marketing with programs such as its Banksgiving push, in which call center workers are authorized to give money to customersin one case awarding $50,000 to a woman who distributes holiday baskets to people in need. If you believe in your brand as a weapon it is easy to take half a million dollars and give it to people in the call center and say Do what you want with it, Brimmer told the Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference in October.

Scrappy underdogThis year, Ally put a new twist on Banksgiving, asking customers how they pay back the community. From that pool it chose people to pay back, including a Houston woman and her daughter who were given a rent-free home for a year. Brimmer says a similar program will become year-round in 2020, and that the bank will reward customers random acts of rightness monthly with gifts from Ally.

The thing that makes us special is that we have always been this scrappy underdog and we have never lost that scrappy underdog mentality, says Brimmer. There is this incredible humbleness that exists within Ally and I think we need to approach every single day with that mentality of How can I do something differently? How can I make a huge difference both personally and professionally?

Dan says that ethos extends to Allys employees and agency partners. He recalls that after his job on the review was over, Brimmer paid to fly him down to Charlotte, North Carolina, for the agency onboarding and gave him a present. Johnson calls Brimmers team pretty damn near a perfect client.

Everybody fully bores into the vision and are really excited to be there, says Greenwood. I mean this in the nicest possible way: They are like a very, very happy cult. They really think they are changing the category. And I think they are.

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Marketers of the Year No. 7: Ally Financial - AdAge.com

Simon Boyd, Sales Director at SmoothSkin

The container ship laden with consumer goods on its way from China to a port somewhere in Europe or the U.S. has become one of the iconic images of the twenty-first century, but Simon Boyd is anxious to stress that the traffic is two way.

We are a British manufacturing company and we are exporting successfully to China, he asserts.

Boyd is Sales Director at Swansea-based company, SmoothSkin. Born out of research into lasers at the local university, the business makes and sells hair removal products that uses high energy light beams directed at the skin. The company, which was already exporting to more than 30 countries, entered the Chinese market in 2017. Since then, Boyd says sales in China have grown 35 fold.

Attractive But Difficult

Now everyone knows that China is a massive consumer market, second only to - and constantly on the point of surpassing - the U.S. and, therefore, a honeypot for export-hungry businesses from all over the world. But its also true that China is often considered a difficult market in terms of trading regulations and the expectations, culture and behaviour of its consumers. So how did a company from South Wales, selling a relatively niche set of products, succeed in capturing the attention of Chinas buyers.

Well, according to Boyd, understanding the culture has been crucial and the company's embrace of the Chinese way of doing things has included participation in the local internet phenomenon of "live streaming."

Going Live

Live streaming via the web is, of course, not unique to China. Anyone can live stream on Youtube and perhaps even monetise the event by asking people to contribute via a payment system such as Paypal.

But live streaming in China is of a different order. Here in Britain or in the U.S., influencers tend to use Instagram or Youtube to build a following and monetise that - transparently or not - through brand endorsement and/or advertising. In China, Live Streaming is carried out from dedicated studios where a new generation of web celebrities broadcast to their fans. But crucially, streaming events are integrated with payment and e-commerce opportunities. Perhaps not surprisingly, the ubiquitous Alibaba runs a live streaming platform as part of its TMall e-commerce hub. It has provided SmoothSkin with a lucrative channel to consumers.

Reaching China's Consumers

When SmoothSkin began making plans to enter China, the first step was to take advice from a local unit of KPMG on the best way to address consumers. The second stage was to find a partner. The company launched as a vendor on TMall. Crucially, it went on to forge a much closer partnership.

The big thing about Alibaba is that they offer an open and transparent relationship, says Boyd. And once they have identified that you have a differentiated product and that you are finding a market, they give you a lot of support.

Much of that support, he says, takes the form of data that has allowed Smoothskin to identify customers and market directly to them. But live streaming has thrown an interesting curve into the mix.

As Boyd explains, SmoothSkin has worked with live streamer, Viya, an online personality who can command an audience of millions. The beauty market is Viyas particular sweet spot and she has been known to rack up sales of close to $50 million to her followers in single twenty four hour period.

Boyd has sat in with Viya and while he wont quote numbers on the record, he was clearly impressed with her ability to generate product sales.

There is perhaps a bigger point here. China has developed its own unique internet culture and any business seeking to sell successfully must take account of that culture and hone its marketing accordingly. SmoothSkin has taken the time to do that.

And as Boyd points out, every market is different. "In Europe, our customers tend to be older women. In China, our buyers are very young. In Japan, they appeal to males. You have to treat each market separately," says Boyd.

The question is, will live streaming-enabled commerce find its way to the U.S. and Europe. Will our armies of influencers become live streamers. That remains to be seen. But for the moment, consumer brands entering China might want to take note of this very particular internet trend.

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Want To Tune In To The Chinese Consumer?- Maybe Live Streaming Is The Answer - Forbes

When it comes to promoting yourself online, lots of companies are looking for the next big "growth hack," often with the expectation that it will provide quick results. Marketing trends continuously change, and search engine optimization (SEO) is no exception. Recently, some have claimed that SEO is unnecessary in the modern search engine, with some going so far as to say that SEO is dead.

Granted, SEO has always had its critics. To those who dont understand it or dont believe in its potential, SEO is often portrayed negatively as an attempt to game the system. The reality is that it takes hard work to generate great online content, and having that content recognized requires effort. Thats what SEO is meant to do help individuals searching for a service to discover the best one possible.

Not every digital marketing technique will stand the test of time, but a mindset of avoiding what you dont understand can be dangerous and detrimental to your business. Dont ax SEO from your marketing strategy.

While SEO isnt a perfect fit for every business, it can be a reliable way to improve your customer leads and conversions, if youre willing to put in the work it requires (or pay someone to do so). Like any major campaign, it should be approached with caution; using outdated SEO tactics can wreak havoc on your websites ranking, which is why understanding how SEO works has never been more relevant.

Heres what you should know about SEO in todays realm of digital marketing, and how you can make the most of it:

SEO Is More Relevant Than Ever

SEO isnt resistant to change. What works to improve search placement today could become a ranking penalty in the future. Skeptics usually point out SEOs fluctuating nature to assert their point about SEO becoming useless. But its important to consider this fluctuation with a bit of context.

How and where each website appears in the list of search results is controlled by a series of algorithms that Google does not share with the public. These algorithms undergo small updates each week (possibly more) and major updates several times each year. Search engines now see a record amount of user activity, with billions of searches made each day. Google uses over 200 ranking factors to determine which results to serve up first, and there are over 1.5 billion websites on the internet. In such a dynamic and changeable environment, its silly to think that any website can achieve and maintain search dominance without conscious effort.

SEO is arguably more important than it was in the past. The idea that a good product or service will speak for itself doesnt hold water when the competition is downright massive. With so many people relying on search engines to discover businesses before visiting them, its crucial that your business appears in these searches and has a noticeable presence.

If youre still skeptical, remember that a growing number of users now perform their searches using digital voice assistants, which bring up the first result rather than the first page. Abandon SEO, and your business may quickly sink into search engine obscurity.

Using SEO To Its Fullest

Given how essential SEO is now, knowing how to use it to its fullest is crucial. Critics of SEO usually point to how quickly searches have changed in recent years. Paid promotions and "local packs" have become the norm, leading some to believe that any attempt to keep up with the constantly shifting field of SEO is futile.

However, ongoing significant change is the very thing that makes SEO a staple of any successful online presence. The belief that SEO is useless often originates from marketers or business owners who set up SEO and then forget about it. Neglect is never a suitable method of promotion, and if its what youve been doing, youre missing out.

Instead, be prepared to invest some time into cultivating an SEO stronghold. Many of the most important ranking factors, such as trust and authority, take time to build, and anyone who promises overnight results is selling you snake oil. Your SEO strategy should also be flexible enough to reflect current search trends and popular keywords. SEO isnt meant to be static; if something isnt working, find a different way.

Keep Up To Date On Recent Developments

As SEO methodology changes, you dont have to reconstruct your current strategy over and over. It just requires a bit of occasional tweaking.

For instance, experts suggest that voice searches will substantially increase in the next few years due to the rising popularity of voice assistants. More voice searches mean that SEO will need to adapt to different phrases and keyword searches to better fit user behavior. This has led some SEO professionals to begin focusing on long-tail keywords, those that feature more than three words. For example, a consumer searching for pizza might type, "Chicago pizza restaurants," while someone performing a vocal search will speak a more natural-sounding phrase, often a question such as, "Where can I get pizza in Chicago?"

Older content is still helpful for text-based searches, which havent become obsolete just yet. When adding new content, keep these new strands of words in mind, and work to incorporate them naturally. Try reading your webpages or blogs out loud to test what a searcher using a voice assistant might experience if they visit your site.

SEO Needs Some Time And Attention

Its fair to suggest that SEO isnt infallible; it needs attention and a significant investment of time to work as intended. If left to its own devices, your SEO wont do the job you expect. Luckily, maintenance is pretty straightforward and can easily be outsourced, as long as you put some research into choosing the right SEO service provider.

In the end, SEO is what you make of it. Dont let your SEO gather cobwebs; its here to stay. Keep it in mind as you continue to develop your businesss online presence.

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Why SEO Is Here To Stay And How To Make The Most Of It - Forbes