Helping E*TRADE pioneer what’s next.
E*TRADE | 2024-2026 | Current work | Role: Integrated ACD
By the ’90s, E*TRADE has solidified itself has a challenger changing the way people invested.
Before E*TRADE, retail investors called brokers, paid hefty commissions, and waited for trades to be executed. Think Wolf of Wall Street. In 1983, E*TRADE helped democratize trading, letting regular people access market information and place trades themselves.
25 years later, its legendary talking baby summed up the brand perfectly: investing could be serious without taking itself too seriously.
When they were acquired by Morgan Stanley in 2020, they had a new opportunity to innovate.
The 2020 acquisition brought together two very different strengths. E*TRADE had the digital platform, retail audience and challenger spirit. Morgan Stanley brought decades of financial expertise, research and an expanded set of capabilities. The opportunity was to make the combination mean something without sanding away what made E*TRADE, E*TRADE.
My team and I pitched and E*TRADE over on a vision for their next evolution.
By 2024, investors and the platforms reaching them had changed. Our pitch was to reclaim E*TRADE’s challenger status with smarter, audience-first performance creative, while finding a new expression of the brand that could marry Morgan Stanley’s credibility with E*TRADE’s wit, accessibility and pioneering spirit. That positioning is directly reflected in the winning pitch.
The first line of work was to test and scale new performance work with automation.
We built around distinct investor audiences, tested what moved them, and used those learnings to evolve the creative. All while finding new ways to put E*TRADE’s personality behind an expanding set of products, capabilities and platforms.
Performance Creative
E*TRADE speaks to everyone from newer investors to active traders. So we built performance creative around distinct audiences, testing the messages, imagery, formats and offers that moved each one. I supervised copy and focused on creative strategy (ad concepts and translating performance into creative testing plans in collaboration with media.)
By 2025, platform changes meant new ways of thinking about targeting.
E*TRADE was building a new desktop platform for its most sophisticated active traders. More powerful tools, deeper customization and more control, backed by the capabilities of Morgan Stanley.
So our creative strategy evolved to keep up.
By 2025, we were producing 940 assets a year, so we introduced automation for repeatable production while continuously evolving our templates around performance learnings, platform behavior and new opportunities. More creative. More learning. Less busywork.
Product Launch Campaign
In 2025, we launched Power E*TRADE Pro.
E*TRADE was building a new desktop platform for its most sophisticated active traders. More powerful tools, deeper customization and more control, backed by the capabilities of Morgan Stanley.
More months I lived inside the mind of a trader to concept our GTM campaign.
My work focused on translating a highly technical product into a launch campaign built around what active traders for whom the enemy is the inertia that keeps them from making the effort to try something new when their current routine feels 'good enough.’
I wrote scripts, and art directed during and post production.
Crypto Launch
Then E*TRADE entered a whole new asset class.
Crypto presented an interesting brand problem. Our audience was curious, but reputation, security and fees mattered. So instead of trying to make ETRADE behave like a crypto-native brand, we leaned into the reason ETRADE entering crypto mattered in the first place.
Crypto, the E*TRADE way.
This national campaign is currently launching. I’m supervising copy and art direction and planning campaign extensions at the moment. Our first unit is live in Times Square. Stay tuned for more!
