BMO’s advice you can use

New ads for BMO’s online investment platform show how a little bit of advice can change everything – and help you avoid possible disaster – using analogies such as a dog wrecking a dinner party, or accidentally drinking foot-squeezed lemonade.

AdviceDirect offers personalized investment guidance through BMO InvestorLine, the financial institution’s online brokerage. It provides customized buying and selling recommendations based on a user’s profile, a direct line to receive advice from BMO’s investment specialists and alerts when a user’s portfolio requires attention.

The new campaign, with creative from KBS Toronto, is built around a series of pre-roll spots, banner and print ads highlighting each of those features, from a dad giving “unbiased advice” on his daughter’s new boyfriend to the importance of keeping an eye on situations that can get out of control to the benefits of researching where your money goes.

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Maxus is handling the media buying on print and digital with Direct Access Digital handling the bid process on digital advertising.

BMO has offered AdviceDirect for two years. Al Gregoire, head of marketing for BMO InvestorLine & Wealth Digital Acquisition says that, because it’s the only service of its kind in Canada, there is a need to continually educate consumers about what it can provide. In the past, ads around the service have been more about value proposition, focused on the advice it offered and the technology behind it, but the new campaign hopes to tie AdviceDirect’s features with BMO’s human-focused brand refresh.

“This project started before the refresh, but we were very aware of the brand update as we moved through production, and that this had to be a consideration,” Gregoire says. “For this campaign, we wanted to make the message more human by showing real-life situations and how those situations could relate to the AdviceDirect service.”

Gregoire says in the past, campaigns for investment and wealth management services would typically come in the winter to align with RRSP season, when Canadians tend to be more wealth management-minded. Now the ads come year-round, as investments do, and are targeted to key segments that are looking for investment advice outside of January and February.

The budget for this campaign is smaller than when AdviceDirect first launched and BMO was more focused on creating mass awareness for the service. Despite that, Gregoire says BMO hopes by having an online- and print-focused campaign, it can target its message more effectively to Canadians of any age looking for regular guidance as they make investments, measuring both awareness and acquisitions of new accounts through the campaign.

“We may roll the campaign into TV in the future, but for now print and online have been identified as what indexes highest against our target,” he says. “We needed channels that would also allow us to educate on the service because of the complexity of the offering.”