Recap
The first FCS Cocktails with Content of the 2025 fall season kicked off on Wednesday, September 24th, at the New York Yacht Club with an illuminating fireside chat featuring Rodes Ponzer, CMO at Crowd Street. Rodes was interviewed by Jaret Posmentier, Director of Partner Relations at Nativo.
The conversation began with Rodes sharing how he went from leadership roles on the agency side for consumer packaged goods (CPG) accounts at Saatchi & Saatchi and TBWA\Chiat\Day, to leading brand and growth strategy for the private market investing platform, Crowd Street. Upon starting in his role as CMO, Rodes initiated changes to Crowd Street’s marketing strategy that yielded success for the young investing platform.
Look Internally
Rodes operates on the belief that a successful marketing strategy and valuable relationship between brand and audience is founded in a company that knows what its purpose is. He pointed out that it’s crucial for a company to create its own story and to develop a culture and environment that people want to talk about. Conducting interviews and workshops with employees to determine what the company meant to them helped to pinpoint Crowd Street’s “north star” that guides its decision-making and strategy.
Communicate Clearly
The financial world is full of jargon that is not easily understood by the average American, and most investors are not well-versed in private market investing. Rodes advocated for distilling the vernacular of private market investing into clear, relatable language that Crowd Street’s audience of retail investors could understand. This would create trust between the brand and the customer.
The “Love-Trust” Matrix
Rodes explained that the ideal state for any brand is achieving both high love and high trust, because having a combination of these two factors leads to a loyal and satisfied customer base. Furthermore, Rodes highlighted that there is no brand love without trust, and building credibility in financial services requires simplifying complexity and creating transparency.
Personas, Personified
Psychographic profiling has helped Crowd Street segment its audience and target them more effectively. Partnering with a colleague at a consumer research firm, Rodes formulated a study based on data from 300,000 of Crowd Street’s members to interrogate how people consider investing strategies. The result was four distinct personas:
- Divergent investor – investors who think independently, resist herd behavior, and form views that differ from consensus
- Frontier investor – accredited investors that invest large dollar amounts in riskier investments like crypto or meme stocks and don’t seek long-term value
- Tactical investor – curious investors who soak up tips and articles on investing to make strategic decisions, mostly made up of investors with first-generation wealth
- Possibilities investor – investors who prioritize trust over research when making investment decisions
Delegate the Proper Percentages
To encourage large amounts of capital investments, brand equity and trust are an absolute necessity. Prior to Rodes’ arrival, he described Crowd Street as delegating 100% of its efforts towards performance marketing, which meant most of the efforts went straight into sales. This created a problem when a PR crisis hit, because the company had no brand trust to fall back on. Considering Crowd Street’s status as a young firm in financial services, Rodes suggested the company needed to spend 80% of its efforts on building its brand and 20% on promoting its performance.
The Agency Relationship
Rodes attributed much of the success of Crowd Street’s marketing strategy to a supportive agency that embodies the spirit of the company. For him, Manifest fit the mold by encouraging experimentation and being unafraid to try and fail.
— This recap was based on reports by FCS Marketing Scholars Gabrielle Branch, Flora Lin, Ava Rabeni, and Adam Serfilippi, with editing by FCS Administrative and Communications Coordinator Juliet McAlee
On September 24, the FCS will stage a Cocktails with Content reception at the New York Yacht Club, welcoming Rodes Ponzer, Chief Marketing Officer of Crowd Street. Rodes will be interviewed by Jaret Posmentier, Principal Client Partner at Nativo.
- Crowd Street is a leading online private market investing platform, expanding access to opportunities that were once reserved for large institutions and a select few investors.
- Since 2012, the company has built a member-focused marketplace that began with commercial real estate and is now growing into additional asset classes—always guided by a commitment to rigorous due diligence, transparency, and a seamless investor experience.
- By combining educational resources with intuitive tools, Crowd Street empowers individuals to make confident decisions and pursue their financial goals in the private markets.
As CMO, Rodes drives brand and growth strategy for Crowd Street, drawing on two decades in global advertising and advisory work with high-growth startups. In leadership roles at Saatchi & Saatchi and TBWA\Chiat\Day, he helped to shape iconic brands from Pampers and Cheerios to Accenture. Today, he teaches at CCNY and guest lectures at NYU Stern and Columbia Business School.
In our fireside chat, Rodes will discuss the challenges of opening private markets to a broader investing audience, the lessons learned from navigating interest rate shifts and compliance constraints, and how his hand-picked creative team is shaping a new narrative for the category. He’ll also explore what financial marketers can learn from applying CPG principles, such as clarity of purpose, speed of execution, and emotional resonance.
In gratitude to Rodes, the FCS will donate $1,000 to the children’s charity of his choice: the Horizons program at St. David’s School in Manhattan; the program’s mission is to prevent academic slide by providing a rich academic and cultural experience for boys from low-income, diverse families from kindergarten through 8th grade.
We invite you to join us for our first in-person event of the Fall where you can connect with new and old friends — and learn about how one of the hottest areas in financial services is being reimagined.
