There’s been no shortage of investment advertising during the Super Bowl in recent years, and this year TD wanted to stand out as a steady hand in the uncertain world of personal trading with the TD Easy Trade app.

The guiding insight was the consumer barrier: regardless of your interest in direct investing, intimidation remains a significant obstacle to getting started. This can lead to using unreliable sources (such as the advice-givers we saw in the spot) offering any semblance of guidance.

With that context in mind, TD Easy Trade wanted to overcome the intimidation of trading on your own by showing up as the reliable source of advice and support in a world where it’s hard to know who to trust. With the TD Easy Trade app, you don’t need to be an expert, but you can always trust TD to be.

There were two aspects to the casting: the friends who needed to be grounded and believable, and the comments section that needed to be entertainingly chaotic.

Casting the friends was standard, but the comments section needed to be bigger. They needed to be both large and representative of the bizarre range of people behind the world of online investing advice. To achieve that scale and range, we cast in three cities: Toronto, Vancouver and Los Angeles. And because there weren’t limits in terms of who might be making internet comments, we cast a wide net and embraced a lengthier schedule. Mainly looking at comedy and improv actors, we focused on scripted characters, but also made sure the approach was flexible, allowing us to develop new characters through the process. Staying open was key and helped juxtapose the normality of the friends’ conversation with the comedic chaos of the comments section.

With an array of well-established self-directed investing tools already available to Canadians, TD’s challenge was to get intimidated investors to choose TD Easy Trade by positioning it as a trustworthy source of investing advice.

With over 3.3M unique TV views and 12.5M social impressions on Super Bowl night alone, TD’s Comment Section drove immediate reach, spotlighting the tool.

Engagement was immediate – TD saw a +880% consideration lift versus benchmarks against the target. TD Easy Trade branded search keywords saw a +268% lift versus best-in-class results and following the Super Bowl, a website traffic increase of 380%.

Finally, the spot drove significant changes in consumer behaviour, with an app download lift of +209% between February 12 and the previous day. Those downloads continued post Super Bowl, averaging +207% for the week versus the week prior.

In the end, the TD Easy Trade accounts opening goal was overachieved by roughly 190%.