The ETF Marketing Memo: July 2026 | Authentic Voices, Real Timing, and the Stories Reporters Actually Want

In this issue, we look at what actually cuts through with reporters today. We break down the AI “house style” journalists are learning to spot, and how to use AI tools without losing your own voice. We also talk with a Pensions & Investments ETF reporter about the blurring line between active and passive investing and what makes an institutional pitch land, and we look at how a recent SpaceX IPO timing quirk turned into two weeks of sustained coverage for one issuer.

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Here’s How To Use AI When You Talk To Journalists

Mark Grandstaff, Director of Content Strategy, Financial Services

By now, ETF marketers are well aware of the advantages they gain with AI tools as they build out their content strategies. But indiscriminate use of AI can inadvertently damage the media relationships that are so important in building credibility and standing apart in a market flooded with issuers.

Media relations hinges on human relationships. People want to hear from other people.

If a reporter asks for market commentary and gets a page of bullet points and em dashes in return, they are going to suspect that they are not hearing the opinions of a human expert. To them, your correspondence will look like the kind of commoditized, general answer they could get from any chatbot, instead of your specific, unique point of view.

You can still use AI in your media communications, but you have to be smart about it.

Be aware of the AI ‘house style’

Gregory has spent four years immersed in AI tools as they have grown from cautious experiments to enterprise tools. In that time, we have become very familiar with the default tone and word choice used by large language models, and how that has changed over time.

Once upon a time, it was “ever-changing landscapes” in every answer. Then we noticed an over-enthusiastic abundance of em-dashes and “It’s not about X, it’s about Y” contrasting statements. Lately we see a lot of staccato sentences that try to build excitement in a way that the subject matter does not always warrant. In general, AI likes to take best practices and run with them to the point where they become an easy-to-identify formula.

People notice these patterns, even if they don’t exactly know what to look for. A piece of collateral or a series of interview questions might look flawless to you, but a journalist who receives dozens (if not hundreds) of pitches a day will see AI tells like they’re glowing red.

Putting your perspective front and center

This should go without saying, but material that you send to a reporter should come from you. Generative AI can do a lot, but it cannot tell you what your own specific opinions and experiences are, and that is the human element that reporters demand on behalf of their readers. They aren’t looking for anodyne commentary that could have come from anywhere, or indeed something they could have gotten from ChatGPT themselves if they asked it.

The reason you want to avoid the AI “house style” is because you don’t want your answers to look like a commodity. You want the reporter to see that the viewpoint they asked for is coming from something with a pulse.

Here’s how that works out in practice, and how you can still use the tools at your disposal to save time.

First, use AI to expand on your notes. Get your thinking down in written form, even if it looks like disjointed notes. Before AI tools hit the scene, subject matter experts often wasted precious time agonizing over how to make their answers look as polished as possible. Now, you can start from thoughts and corroborating links that are unambiguously from your own perspective, and then use AI to flesh it out.

Then, make sure it sounds like you. We equip our agency’s AI tools with standing orders to pre-emptively prune the most obvious AI-isms from the writing we produce. Even if you don’t have something similar, go through and give it tweaks to make sure it matches how you would say things. Don’t worry about reintroducing tiny mistakes - paradoxically, little errors sometimes go a long way to assuring a reporter that you’re human.

Everyone has a different level of familiarity with AI-enhanced writing, and it’s never too early to experiment. In our integrated communications work, we do our best to showcase the human element in our client stories. No matter how much or little you use AI, it’s worth foregrounding your personality and perspective in your answers, so your time-saving tools become assets instead of threats to the professional relationships you need.

Q&A with: Remy Samuels, ETF Reporter at Pensions & Investments

 

By: Chase Kosinski, Account Supervisor 

This month, we spoke with Remy Samuels, ETF Reporter at Pensions & Investments, who covers one of the industry's fastest-evolving beats through the lens of institutional investors. From the active ETF boom and mutual fund conversions to the growing role of AI in newsrooms and the expanding use of ETFs by pensions, endowments, and insurers, Remy has spent the past year examining the trends reshaping the market. We asked her which developments deserve more attention, what makes an ETF story resonate with P&I readers, and where she sees the industry headed in the second half of 2026.

You recently completed your first year at P&I as its dedicated ETF reporter. What's the story you keep coming back to, or the one trend or development you think the industry still isn't fully grappling with?

One trend that keeps resurfacing is the ongoing blurring of lines between active and passive investing. Most recently, we saw this with some of the biggest index providers updating their decades-long rulebooks to fast-track mega IPOs into their indexes, which became an even bigger story because of the SpaceX launch into public markets. While these indexes were built around a set of rules, and the ETFs that track them are viewed as “passive products,” it’s clear that index providers are making active decisions around how benchmarks should be adapting to evolving market dynamics. As a result, index ETF selection is a much more active decision today than it has been before, so the line between what is active and what is passive is becoming increasingly unclear. I think this is an issue the industry has yet to fully grapple with, and we may start to see some dispersion between indexes that choose to fast-track mega IPOs versus those that do not and will still require longer seasoning periods.

You've reported extensively on the active ETF boom and the growing debate around mutual fund conversions versus dual share classes. From your conversations with institutional investors and asset managers, what's actually driving decision-making on that question, and where do you see it landing?

Asset managers all have different philosophies around this. Many believe that the dual-share class structure will provide efficiencies to investors and give them the option to choose the wrapper they most prefer, but there are also some managers that strongly believe that ETFs and mutual funds should be kept separate.

It really comes down to a business decision and whether or not the issuer wants to keep the mutual fund alive. Everyone appreciates the benefits of ETFs, but if a mutual fund has a lot of 401(k) assets attached to it, for instance, it makes sense for the issuer to maintain that structure and perhaps attach an ETF share class to it rather than fully convert the fund. However, the option to launch ETF share classes is still very new, and many managers are taking a ‘wait and see’ approach until more of the operational kinks are worked out. Until more broker dealers and intermediaries get on board with share classes, it’s possible conversions might continue to be the more dominant strategy for issuers that want to bring more assets to the ETF wrapper.

For institutional investors, they often like to see that a fund has a long track record or a certain amount of assets before they dip their toes in. Large institutions like pension funds and university endowments are still in the early innings of ETF adoption, but if they see a long-standing mutual fund convert into an ETF, or an established strategy as an ETF share class, it may pique their interest more than a brand new ETF that was just launched and has no track record.

AI seems to be reshaping almost every corner of financial services, but what about the newsroom itself? How has it changed the way you report on the ETF industry, whether in how you research, source, or tell stories?

AI is definitely changing how the newsroom operates, and I have found that it serves as a helpful tool from a story development standpoint. I think it is most useful when figuring out the best way to frame a story or spotlight the most compelling parts of my reporting for our particular audience. The conversations I have with issuers, analysts, and institutional investors are always going to drive my story ideas, but using some of the internal AI tools available to us at P&I has been helpful in delivering that information in the most effective way possible.

From a journalist's perspective, which ETF issuers, or categories of issuers, are doing the best job of getting their story in front of P&I readers? And where do most pitches or communications fall flat?

The best pitches I receive are ones that take into account topics or themes that would be most applicable or of interest to P&I’s audience of institutional investors. When it comes to new ETF launches, I try to connect the launch to a broader investment theme, so it’s ideal when sources can speak to larger trends in the industry and are not just touting why people should buy their ETF. I also find it particularly helpful when issuers can provide data on flows they are seeing into particular strategies or categories of funds, as that catches my eye in a pitch.

Looking at the second half of 2026, what themes or beats are you most focused on covering? What should ETF marketers and communications teams be thinking about if they want to be part of those conversations?

For the remainder of this year, I am focused on continuing to cover the boom in active ETFs and just the sheer number of ETF launches. While there continues to be innovation and new ideas of what can be put into the ETF wrapper, it prompts the question of how many strategies the industry can really handle, as market makers and brokerage platforms need to be able to support these products in order for them to trade properly. I am also interested in covering how the ETF industry will respond to the other mega IPOs that are expected this year. Prior to the SpaceX IPO, we saw several issuers add private exposure to the company in some of their ETFs, and I think this issue of whether private assets belong in the ETF wrapper will be an interesting topic to keep following.

And as always, for P&I, I am most interested in how institutional investors are using ETFs — whether that be pension funds, university endowments, family offices, or insurance companies. Because I am always approaching stories through that lens, I am less interested in pitches that are aimed at a retail audience or are not suitable strategies for a long-term institutional portfolio. I say that with the caveat that ETF development and market progression can change that suitability quickly — who’d have thought a few years ago that we’d be talking about crypto and prediction market ETFs in an institutional context?

When SpaceX went public on June 12 in the largest IPO in history, ETF issuers raced to get SpaceX-linked products to market. As exchanges pushed several competitors' leveraged launches to the following Monday over concerns about disrupting SpaceX's own debut, Defiance ETF's Daily 2x Space ETF (SPCL) was the only U.S. ETF to launch right on IPO day, anchoring to the $135 offer price and giving traders 2X daily SpaceX exposure from the opening bell.

Standout moment: The first-mover story drove two weeks of sustained coverage across broadcast and trade press. Sylvia Jablonski joined CNBC on IPO day to discuss the new product, and returned to CNBC a week later for a written article on "the riskiest SpaceX stock trade of all." InvestmentNews, Reuters, and Markets Media all covered the industry-wide launch delay directly, with articles citing Defiance’s SPCU, SPCL, and SPCQ products by name. Schwab Network closed the run with a segment on SPCX-driven single-stock leverage trends.

Why it worked: By having a product ready to trade on IPO day itself instead of waiting with the pack, Defiance turned a regulatory timing story into a first-mover narrative reporters wanted to tell. Sylvia Jablonski's consistent availability as a trusted source on CNBC and Schwab Network kept Defiance top of mind through the entire news cycle, from pre-IPO anticipation to post-launch flow analysis.