Amid recent marketing volatility and financial uncertainty, E*TRADE from Morgan Stanley repurposed the "E*TRADE Baby" for a wedding themed Super Bowl ad campaign positioning the brand as the financial partner clients and prospects want by their side to guide them through their financial future.
Objective
The original home of online investing, E*TRADE has a decades-long history of being one of investors' top choices for trading. The brand has since expanded its offerings, providing clients with a full suite of financial tools and services that empower them to take control of their long-term financial planning. The company recently joining forces with Morgan Stanley has only added to its credibility as a long-term investing partner, allowing the brand to provide more robust financial services. This year's Super Bowl campaign was a critical opportunity for the E*TRADE from Morgan Stanley brand to get consumers thinking about their finances and to provoke them to take action.
Context
This work is part of a continued effort to spark increased consideration of the evolved E*TRADE from Morgan Stanley brand. Last year, the brand leveraged its game-day ad buy to reintroduce the E*TRADE Baby after retiring the brand character years ago. The E*TRADE Baby represented the original challenger spirit of the brand, an element it was conscious not to lose after joining forces with Morgan Stanley. This year's spot needed to continue the story of the baby in a way that felt true to his long-established character while employing timely storylines and emerging social media tools and trends.
Target Audience
E*TRADE's core target audience is referred to as "emerging affluents" — investors who have started making a good living and are beginning to invest long-term. They are in the life-stage where they're starting to face big financial planning decisions (such as getting married, buying a house, having children, etc.) but are worried about balancing their financial priorities.
The brand knows these decisions are common triggers that inspire emerging affluents to reconsider their financial services partners. While most emerging affluents were despondent about financial planning giving the current market conditions, E*TRADE believed that if it could get them in the mindset of one of these trigger moments that it could provoke them to consider E*TRADE as a partner to help them confidently take on these financial challenges.
Creative and Media Strategy
Messaging and media activations both focused on driving relevancy and association. With financial apprehension commonly felt during big life moments, E*TRADE identified a relatable occasion to insert its brand — a wedding. E*TRADE ran alongside existing wedding-themed content to find its audience when they were in the most relevant and receptive mindset. To ensure the message would resonate, the brand tapped into a culturally-relevant event, the Super Bowl, to drive association of E*TRADE within broader life moments.
E*TRADE's three-phased media approach mimicked that of Super Bowl coverage. The brand strategically weighted media before, during and after the game, diversifying content across digital and social to sustain audience interest and engagement throughout the campaign.
In addition to a print activation in the New York Times (NYT) Vows section, E*TRADE also took over the NYT Wordle app (making the five-letter word of the day "union") and placed campaign banners throughout the site. The brand also took over digital wedding-planning site HoneyFund, activating across its homepage, email outreach, and social media. These placements allowed E*TRADE to engage its audience within contextually relevant environments.
Knowing that social is the source for inspiration around life changes like marriage, E*TRADE placed wedding-themed, E*TRADE Baby videos made specifically for paid social across Twitter, Meta, and TikTok. This content helped the brand engage consumers across different social platforms, reinforcing its message and moving consumers into the consideration set.
Following the game, E*TRADE created a robust online video presence across digital platforms such as Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Yahoo. The brand also supported this post-game leg of the campaign by placing bespoke creative across additional online display buys.
E*TRADE's goal was to get consumers in the mindset of confidently making a big financial decision and its strategic use of digital and social media allowed it to do just that. The brand packaged its message about long-term investing into content that felt native and on-theme in different ways according to the natural behaviors and/or content in that channel.
In each activation, E*TRADE's creative idea and brand message was able to shine in a new way that was not only entertaining but relevant to the lives of consumers. On TikTok, the brand tapped into viral wedding trends. On Instagram, it mimicked how real users might post about real weddings. On Wordle, E*TRADE hacked the word of the day, and on HoneyFund, the brand spoke to the real financial concerns of real couples. Not only was the brand able to find different factions of its audience across different platforms, it was able to entertain them in new ways each time.
Overall, E*TRADE was able to drive relevancy and association by marrying audience and context. Having a deep understanding of its audiences' attitudes and media behaviors, allowed the brand to differentiate its messaging approach and diversify its media plan to give opportunity for audience interaction with multiple brand touch points to push users down the funnel.
Following a boom in interest in investing during the pandemic, the financial services category has started to normalize and return to pre-pandemic levels of consumer interest and engagement. While talk of a recession, increased market volatility, and increased cost of living have kept financial preparedness on the minds of Americans, investors across the board are becoming increasingly cautious about their finances and less eager to make big financial moves. E*TRADE faced these challenging times by reassuring current and prospective clients that there's never a bad time to take control of their finances and get prepared for their financial future.
The following metrics gathered within the month following the Super Bowl confirmed that E*TRADE's spot had successfully broken through the category noise, clearly communicated its brand message, and driven consumer interaction with the brand:
This campaign went beyond a typical integrated campaign to successfully move audience members down the funnel, leveraging multiple touchpoints to take them from an increased awareness of the brand to interaction with the E*TRADE site and even through to opening a new account.
The creative concept was strong enough to capture the attention of the national media and Super Bowl viewers across the country, allowing the brand to deliver its message to potential clients at different life stages of their financial journey. It also successfully incorporated the brand's character, the E*TRADE Baby, at multiple touchpoints, ensuring brand recognition and avoiding misattribution.
Overall, this was an incredibly flexible creative concept that enabled E*TRADE to plug-in its message across multiple high-interest touchpoints, successfully delivering real business results and laying the foundation for future E*TRADE campaigns to reinforce this message.
