With the monthly Market DecodeTM video series, our aim is not just to provide clients and prospects with timely investing insights; we want to shine a spotlight on our “stars” -- the strong, passionate, deeply knowledgeable bench of analysts in the Chief Investment Office for Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank.
The need: The Chief Investment Office produces multiple weekly and monthly reports analyzing the markets and identifying potential opportunities and risks for investors. These reports are often dense with facts and can be time-consuming to absorb and difficult to understand if you are not a market expert.
Each short, engaging Market Decode video highlights compelling key insights drawn from these reports and “decodes” them in clear language understandable even to people new to the investing. We encourage our analysts to be conversational and relaxed in their approach – as if they were speaking to a friend or neighbor, not a fellow expert.
The process of producing each Market Decode video starts with identifying a topic that will resonate with a majority of our clients and prospects that month. The content marketing team sifts through the various weekly and monthly reports produced by the Chief Investment Office to identify issues that are top of mind for investors. We share our recommendations with the CIO for approval. Then a short, conversational script, generally under 2 minutes, is drafted and shared with our subject matter expert, and a taping date is scheduled.
Each video is on a tight schedule requiring quick turnaround and expedited review. To facilitate speed to market, the normal broader marketing-team governance routine is limited to CIO leadership and subject matter experts. Thanks to this streamlined process, we are able to cut our time to launch significantly. For instance, when China announced its competitive AI model Deepseek at the end of January 2025, we were live by Feb. 4 with a Market Decode, “The new AI kid on the block,” featuring Chief Investment Officer Chris Hyzy’s take on what it meant for the markets.
As part of our annual year-ahead Outlook programming, we bolstered our Outlook 2026 webcast with three complementary year-ahead Market Decodes, diving deeper into major themes of our broader Outlook coverage, Geopolitics, policy and your portfolio, Expert views on equities and the economy and Will consumer spending stay strong?
The Market Decode videos regularly rank high in Knotch satisfaction scores, a tribute to the timely, actionable investing insights they deliver. They are a favorite of our Financial Advisors, who regularly share them via email with clients and prospects to showcase our brand’s thought leadership. From January to November 2025, Merrill Financial Advisors sent nearly 50,000 emails with links to our Market Decodes; they had a 55.24 open rate. An additional 6,765 emails were sent by Private Bank and Private Wealth Management advisors, with a similar open rate.
The Outlook 2026 related Market Decodes received 12,513 unique visitors in just the first month, with 356 actions taken to receive more information.
The addition of Market Decode social videos to our newly launched Instagram and Meta feeds have helped to grow audience exponentially, with Instagram followers, for instance, increasing 5-fold over the course of the year.