Future Proof Festival: xETFs' Jon Ryan on Building a Marketing Function From Scratch
Jon Ryan, Head of Marketing at xETFs, sat down for an interview on the ground at Future Proof Festival, held September 14 to 17, in Huntington Beach, California. Ryan designed the company's logo on his first day on the job and built xETFs' entire brand and visual identity before turning to campaigns. In the interview, he walked through what it takes to run marketing at a brand-new ETF issuer, and where AI fits into that work.
Building the brand from day one
Ryan calls design one of the more enjoyable parts of his job, even though he doesn't consider himself a designer by training. His early focus was striking a balance between familiarity and credibility: speaking a language advisors and investors already recognize while appearing new enough to earn a second look.
"You have to speak a certain language that people are familiar with, meet them where they're at to an extent, but you also need to appear new and different and interesting," he said.
Balancing familiarity and credibility
Online audiences have an extremely short attention span, Ryan said, which puts pressure on visual aesthetics and taglines to do a lot of work quickly. xETFs' fund strategies are often complex, so distilling them into something that lands in a few seconds is deliberate, iterative work.
"You don't want to just hit someone with a paragraph of text," he said. "You want to distill down what's the essential reason they should care, and that's not an exact science. It's trial and error, and it's artful."
He gathers feedback through social media comments, Google Alerts set up for any mention of the firm's funds, and direct conversations with advisors and investors, the kind of conversations Future Proof's format is built around.
Speed is a planning problem, not a marketing one
Asked what it's like marketing for a fast-moving issuer, Ryan said the compliance process adds real overhead. Firms have to plan far in advance while staying flexible enough to respond to a last-minute comments from compliance.
He pushed back on the idea that speed in ETFs is primarily a marketing function. The real driver of speed to market, he said, is product design: formulating a fund idea, filing it, and anticipating where investor interest will be by the time the fund can launch. What looks like a fast-moving campaign from the outside was usually planned days or weeks ahead of time.
Marketing's role in that process is to avoid becoming a bottleneck. Delays stack up when lawyers, complaince, or a distributor are waiting on a response, so the team has to be ready to move quickly on their end even when the underlying timeline was set well in advance.
Where AI helps, and where it doesn't
Ryan uses AI daily for productivity, particularly for document work and automating repetitive tasks. He draws a hard line at letting it make creative decisions.
"I try not to let AI think for me," he said. "What AI does is regurgitate. It's inherently not creative. It's not thinking. My job is to be creative, so I can't rely on AI for that. What I can do is ask it to do things and then critique it and fine-tune it."
He said what a small team can now produce in a single day, including a full marketing campaign with multiple components, would have been hard to believe five years ago. He called that both a blessing and a curse: the capability has raised the bar for what's expected, which means teams have to use AI just to keep pace while still applying human judgment on top of it.
What's working right now
Ryan's advice to other marketers came down to two things. First, when launching a new fund, straightforward content that answers the most common questions performs well. Investors are "shopping the shelf," he said, curious about anything new, and won't spend long on any one piece of content.
Second, what he called "lazy content," meaning an unpolished phone video with no post-production, tends to read as more authentic and trustworthy than a highly produced corporate video. He linked that shift partly to how TikTok has changed content consumption and shortened attention spans generally, though he stopped short of calling it a purely generational effect.
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