Rydex Infographics Change The Game For Investment Marketing

Hearty congratulations and bubbly all around to the online marketing professionals who produced GetAlts.com, a microsite launched this week by Rydex|SGI to create attention for alternative investments.

I landed on the site with minimal expectations but some curiosity about the name. Compliance officers in my past would have killed “GetAlts” for any number of reasons so the first kudos goes to Rydex for delivering a name with some marketing magic.

More important, though, is the interactivity on the site. I’ve spent a bit of time on it now—long visits that the search engines will duly note and credit the site for—and haven’t read more than 200 words. Instead, I’ve been working with the interactive graphs and charts.

If you’ve been involved in the sales and marketing of mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for any length of time, you’ll recognize all of these—the checkerboard of annual asset class performance, the efficient frontier graph, etc.

Distributing these in print or on the Web as flat communications has sub-optimized the information value of these charts. Rydex is changing the game for investment product marketers by animating our tried-and-true charts and adding audio explanations. They are showing what these data-heavy charts mean.

The marquee infographic is the Modern Markets Scorecard, which of course includes alternative investments as well as the standard asset classes. This ought to be powerful linkbait for the site—given that, I’d find a way to offer links to the rest of the good stuff on GetAlts.com.


My second favorite is the Alternative Portfolio Hypotheticals. The Efficient Frontier by Decade works far better than a flat chart but even with the audio explanation, it’s still not for beginners. Beginners can take a look at the The Historical Performance and Trends of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. All are excellent, I’d add a counter to the videos to let the viewer know how much more.

Well done, Rydex, for bringing meaning to what can be dense topics. We’ve been tracking the use of visualizations for a while now and are so pleased to see an investment company add some to the mix.

Will GetAlts produce business? It’s too soon to say but Marketing has done what it can by creating something worthwhile that will generate attention. Of course, the work is far from done. Now comes the rest of what Marketing does: measurement, the correlation of attention to leads and leads to sales, the ongoing site maintenance and refreshing, promotion, etc.

After Opening Night, comes the next performance and the next…there’s no business like show business.