AssetMark hires a Russell CMO as the platform fight turns to messaging

The fight among custodians, RIAs, and turnkey platforms has been waged on software features—tax engines, meeting-prep tools, private-market shelves—but as those capabilities get replicated, the next differentiator is the message around them, and AssetMark's September 1 hire puts that shift in the C-suite. Kristin Ganong, most recently chief marketing officer at Russell Investments and a veteran of Wellington Management and MFS Investment Management, joins the Concord, California-based platform as senior vice president and chief marketing officer, overseeing brand and advisor engagement.

Ganong arrives from Russell, where she led brand and commercial alignment for the global asset manager and helped advance its U.S. retail and wealth business; before that she held senior marketing and client experience leadership roles at Wellington and MFS. Chairman and group CEO Lou Maiuri said in the announcement that Ganong brings "a compelling combination of deep wealth management experience, commercial orientation, and marketing transformation leadership," praising her "player-coach approach" as a fit for the company's expansion. In the new role, she will lead AssetMark's marketing organization and work with leadership to align marketing with growth priorities and deepen engagement with advisors. The platform, which reports 456,453 accounts and $91.8 billion in regulatory AUM and includes AssetMark Trust Company, Voyant, and Adhesion Wealth Advisor Solutions, is pushing further into the tools advisors use day to day, including the company's Talk Tracks feature, an AI tool aimed at the advisor-client conversation that PWD covered in August.

The CMO hire marks the talent war reaching the platform layer itself; Schwab, Pershing, and Orion reset their leadership in a single week in August. For Ganong, the assignment is to make AssetMark's story stick with advisors who have plenty of options, because marketing at an asset manager usually means selling a strategy, while marketing at a wealth platform means convincing independent advisors to put their clients' data on your rails. Her background connecting commercial strategy to brand and client experience suggests she understands the difference. The platform that wins the next leg will not be the one with the longest feature list, but the one whose advisors can explain why they stayed.

Watch whether Ganong's arrival produces new tools for advisors rather than new taglines. Brand spend that never reaches the advisor experience is the classic waste in this industry.