E*Trade ad wants you to trade stocks to get back at the rich
Don’t occupy Wall Street — get rich yourself.
That’s the message from a full-minute ad from E*Trade that aired earlier this week on Monday Night Football, angling to channel anger at inequality back into capitalism.
The ad depicts an office schlub who is jealous of a senior colleague who double parks his sports car and spends hours gabbing on the phone with his feet up on the desk.
Following a montage of decadent images paired with “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof, the words “This is getting a little ridiculous” flash on the screen and the pencil pusher logs into his E*Trade account.
The ad was one of several released in June as part of E*Trade’s “Don’t Get Mad” campaign. E*Trade said it’s hoping to channel “financial frustration” — which is increasingly prevalent thanks to social media — into “positive action.”
“In this campaign, we acknowledge these everyday frustrations, and encourage consumers to channel them into positive action,” E*Trade’s head of marketing, Lea Stendahl, said in June. “It’s an invitation to step off the sidelines and take control of their own financial destiny.“
E*Trade has a long history with the NFL. The company ran Super Bowl ads of featuring the iconic E*Trade baby from 2008 until 2013.
The baby was ditched in 2014 soon after the company fired marketing head Nick Utton and started using Oglivy & Mather instead of Grey Advertising.