Morgan Stanley hopes E-Trade Super Bowl commercial will top off wealth management funnel

Morgan Stanley's wealth management business is often likened to a funnel. Now the wealth management giant is betting that a 30-second Super Bowl ad will give it perhaps its best chance ever to pour in some new clients.

The contest on Sunday between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers is already expected to draw more eyeballs than last year's Super Bowl, which itself set a record with more than 115 million viewers. That makes the championship game a nearly ideal opportunity to pitch the online brokerage E-Trade to perhaps millions of people who aren't making the most of money they have to invest, said Andrea Zaretsky, the chief marketing officer for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.

E-Trade's 30-second spot, featuring the brokerage's well-known talking babies in a round of pickleball, exhorts the audience to "get in the game." Zaretsky said the tagline is an obvious reference to the Super Bowl but is also meant to encourage viewers to think about how they could be doing more with their money.

"We believe we've never been in a better position to serve clients in every walk of life thanks to Morgan Stanley's category one position," Zaretsky said. "And the big game really gives us an incredibly broad and diverse audience to tell that story to." 

Wide end of the funnel

Executives at Morgan Stanley have often described their wealth management business as a "funnel." At its wide end sits E-Trade, the online brokerage the firm acquired in 2020 for roughly $13 billion. 

The service's offers of commission-free trading and easy trading in stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other common investing vehicles are meant to appeal to people with moderate amounts of investable money who want to try their hand in the market. As their assets accrue over time, Morgan Stanley's hope is that these customers will move down the funnel into full relationships with advisors.

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Morgan Stanley has set itself the ambitious goal of eventually having $10 trillion in assets under management, up from $6.6 trillion today. One big part of the plan is to use E-Trade as an entryway to the full scope of advisory services the firm has to offer.

At Morgan Stanley and many of its Wall Street rivals, the standard minimum for working with a financial planner is $250,000 in investable assets.

"Our goal is, of course, to win prospects early so we can grow with them and provide relevant products and services as their needs evolve," Zaretksy said.

What $7 million will buy

Putting a message before such a large audience of course isn't cheap. For a 30-second spot like Morgan Stanley's, the cost is running to $7 million on average this year.

Zaretsky didn't say how much Morgan Stanley paid for its ad. She noted many considerations can influence the price, including how far in advance a firm enters into a deal to run a commercial.

Whatever the cost, the expenditures-per-viewer equation is likely to be favorable to advertisers this year. Not only does the Super Bowl feature two popular teams; it's also expected to benefit from the so-called "Taylor Swift effect," drawing in viewers primarily interested in the romance between the Grammy-winning singer and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

Charles Taylor, a professor of marketing at the Villanova School of Business, has seen data from market research firm YouGov showing a 2% to 3% increase in E-Trade's favorability ratings for a month after it ran previous Super Bowl ads. That's a remarkable boost, he said, at a time when the fracturing of media has made it harder than ever to obtain a mass audience for any single ad.

"It's the only venue left like this," Taylor said. "The Super Bowl is completely a unique property. The Grammys, for instance, might reach 20 million or so viewers. But that is nowhere what the Super Bowl can do with almost everybody watching it all at once."

Those talking babies

It does help that E-Trade has found a popular marketing campaign and stuck with it over the years. The online brokerage introduced its talking babies in 2008, well before the acquisition by Morgan Stanley, and ran ads in the previous two Super Bowls.

Morgan Stanley's E-Trade spot, developed by the ad agency 72andSunny and directed by Randy Krallman of the production company SMUGGLER, eschews the reliance on celebrities whom many firms are turning to this year to garner attention. Instead, it takes a jab at the surging popularity of pickleball with the quip: "It's basically tennis for babies, but for adults" 

"People really do like those talking babies," Taylor said. "They do a good execution of it from year to year, and they are obviously getting good feedback."

Financial service firms have had a somewhat mixed history with sports ads. There were the notorious spots in the 2022 championship game featuring celebrities like Larry David and Matt Damon hawking crypto-related products. But groups like the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, whose professional credentials are considered the gold standard in the industry, have used ads aired during the World Series to proselytize the need for sound financial advice.

Early release

Morgan Stanley's E-Trade spot is one of about 40 ads to have been released before the Super Bowl this year.  Mary Scott, an associate professor of strategic communications at Montclair State University, said firms have found that early airings help to build anticipation for Super Bowl ads in general and can help fix a particular commercial in the public consciousness for longer periods of time.

"There's always a lot of viewers who tune into the Super Bowl just for the ads," Scott said. "So a lot of brands have gotten really smart and said, 'We need to do some smart marketing around our Super Bowl spots," because that presents an opportunity to create some early buzz."

Scott said she had her students watch the ads that have been released so far on Thursday and jot down some initial thoughts. Eventually, she'll ask them to rank all the ads and then will submit the results to USA Today for its annual Ad Meter survey of Super Bowl commercials. 

But the final tallying up can't be done until after the weekend, when all of the ads will have aired. So far, Scott said, the response to E*Trade's commercial has been favorable.

Scott noted the students in her class are largely used to being able to skip or fast forward through ads they don't find immediately appealing.

"So it's significant that they were able to interest a group of people who aren't predisposed to watching 30- or 60-second ad spots," she said. "Now I'm curious what will happen next. Because I'm betting most of my students aren't E-Trade customers." 

Building on the buzz

Zaretsky said Morgan Stanley is hoping to take any heightened attention brought about by the Super Bowl spot and build on it with a special promotional offer for people who open new brokerage accounts. Investors can now receive as much as a $1,000 deposit if they open an E-Trade non-retirement account. 

To qualify, customers must transfer money in from outside E-Trade and Morgan Stanley. They then must hold it in E-Trade for at least six months or they could have to forfeit the cash rewards.

The day following the Super Bowl, Morgan Stanley is also holding a new event it's calling Money Monday. Current and prospective clients can sign up to view a chat between Morgan Stanley Chief Global Economist Seth Carpenter and Nicole Lapin, a financial journalist and author.

Zaretsky said Morgan Stanley will be looking at a number of indicators to gauge the success of its Super Bowl ad and related promotions.

"We're going to be looking at everything from new accounts to engagement and traffic to doing some social listening," she said. "All that will help us understand how it's being received. And over time, we never wanted to be a one-and-done. We want to have a long-term strategy, which is why we're super excited with Money Monday."