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Creative Agency: Modem Media
Technology Vendor: Unicast
Publisher(s): NYTimes.com, Yahoo!, CBS MarketWatch
The objectives of Harrisdirect’s online campaigns are to drive account acquisition and to promote the Harrisdirect brand. When developing our online media plan, we take two different, but complementary paths to planning the buy and deciding which creatives to run in each placement. We view the 468s and buttons as acquisition units while the larger, out-of-box placements are used for branding. The branding units are further segmented into contextually relevant placements where specific creatives/clients are targeted, based on content. All of the campaigns are developed based on Harrisdirect’s core messaging strategy of direct investing targeting the disciplined and informed long-term investor with $100K+ in investable assets.
The creatives focus on individual, fictitious direct investors and how they incorporate investing into their everyday lives. We strive to give each direct investor a personality and convey a passion that is complementary to investing; this allows us to showcase a different Harrisdirect investing product or helpful tool within each scenario. However, in order to give the direct investors a personality we need them to come to life and traditional photos are not conducive to delivering on this strategy. We need photography that is shot specifically to fit different sized units and in a style that allows the ads to animate, much in the same manner as an old fashioned cartoon.
Modem Media worked with Harrisdirect to design an online creative photo strategy and developed a list of four direct investors. The photographer we chose specializes in shooting real people and understood the types of shots needed to fit all creative sizes. He also ensured the photos were taken in a multi-framed style that allowed for animation.
The campaign has been very successful in delivering new accounts at allowable costs and has boosted brand awareness by 620% since the re-branding to Harrisdirect. We have successfully proven that branding can be accomplished online without dramatically increasing the cost-per-acquisition.
Recently, we completed our second online photo shoot that features the return of a favorite -- Direct Investor Elsie Lee.
-- Eric Frenchman, Director, Online Advertising, Harrisdirect
Harrisdirect is the latest incarnation of what was formerly CSFBdirect (formerly DLJdirect and formerly PCFN). Needless to say, Harrisdirect has a branding problem. Our client ultimately decided that online branding was a worthwhile investment.
The traditional campaign created six characters, known as "Direct Investors." The idea is for Harrisdirect to be the more human, more real online investing solution. This contrasts with some brands that focus more on tools and performance. That isn't to say that Harrisdirect is all style and no substance -- indeed Harrisdirect’s is consistently one of the highest ranking sites in the direct investing category. It's just that we use a very liberal definition of "investing." We recognize that people (particularly affluent active investors) are deeply passionate about interests, hobbies; their family, even. The Harrisdirect value proposition is that direct investing is all about taking a hands-on approach to everything you do...whether it be tending to your garden or tending to your portfolio.
The online campaign, comprised of extremely large (from a pixel-by-pixel standpoint) all-Flash assets and an all-Flash landing page experience, goes "deep" on some of the characters, and subsequently pays off on the Harrisdirect competitive product differences.
Where the TV and Print campaigns stop, our online campaign picks up and allows consumers to actually see what is on each direct investor's screen. It is this type of deep, experiential message that is perfect for an online branding campaign. It is not too involved (like a diagnostic), but at the same time it offers more than merely recasting print ads in the online space. This is where we "build the bridge" between practicing golf at home, for example, and setting your financial goals using one of our best-in-class tools.
The original characters were developed for television and print. The characters in this advertising campaign (save Elsie Lee) were created exclusively for online advertising. As such, we were able to photograph the characters with specific online animations in mind -- a luxury seldom afforded to online creative professionals.
A strange thing happened as a result of this photo shoot. We actually discovered that the traditional agency was interested in our Direct Investors, and they turned our characters into in-store signage for their investment centers. This is a first as far as I am concerned.
As for challenges, we're always bumping up against the K-size limitations, even with having art directed these for Web advertising. Just two years ago, 8 K per banner was the norm and we got excited if we were afforded 15 K for an ad. Then all of a sudden, skyscrapers and big boxes came along and we started doing Flash ads -- and now 30K is the norm and we're looking at (for the full-screen interstitials) 300 K. But, we even bump up against that. It's the nature of the game.
-- Charles Marrelli, Creative Director, Modem Media
New York Times on the Web provides an upscale context for the Harrisdirect message. The audience is perfect because we have a high household income audience that basically has large portfolios and the like. So for a brand like Harrisdirect it makes sense.
What is interesting is that the Harrisdirect people are very sophisticated when it comes to the creative execution. While the creative might look nice, it’s important that it performs. What a lot of people in our industry will do is they’ll take their creative, and they will place it in a given Website, and when it doesn’t perform, they’ll come back and they’ll say that the site has not performed. They ignore some of the basic concepts that are fundamental to direct marketing and database marketing. Clearly when you start talking about direct marketing, it’s all about control. A lot of times people don’t want to spend the money to come up with enough creative to have a critical mass where they can establish a control creative, and then they may not necessarily measure back to that control. That’s changing in our industry, but that’s something that Harrisdirect has done for some time and has done well. That company’s advertising people take responsibility for their creative and for the presentation of their creative. That means they put a lot more energy into it, a lot more effort into it and take a lot more responsibility for it, and that clearly makes for a better partnership.
-- Hayward Henderson, Senior Account Executive, NYTimes.com
Harrisdirect has numerous positions throughout the CBSMarketWatch site, but it really benefits from being associated with our proprietary content, which is the business and financial stories written by our own journalists. So Harrisdirect has a lot of what we call the rich media windows -- which is the IAB rectangles -- but then relatively unique to the online brokerage space, it also, on a fairly regular basis, takes advantage of our intromessages.
The company’s marketers understand our demographic really well, and they understand the affluent, individually thinking, focused investor demographic is reading those news pages.
I think what Harrisdirect does in its marketing is what the self-directed individual investor is often coached to do which is: stay the course. The company has pretty much maintained a similar focus through the active NASDAQ in market times and the less active. So just like the investors are supposed to stay the course, Harrisdirect has stayed the course with its marketing campaigns. The campaigns have been consistent day in and day out. The company believes in its direction, believes in what it’s doing, and sticks to it.
-- Scot McLernon, CBSMarketWatch
By running within Yahoo!’s Finance channel, Harrisdirect is able to leverage the unmatched industry-specific marketing solutions, an advertising platform with robust, high-impact ad units, and a full suite of rich-media solutions that allow advertisers to target an engaged, affluent user base of more than 8.5 million users monthly. Reaching potential customers within the Yahoo Finance channel means that Harrisdirect's message is seen in the context of the user's focus on comprehensive financial information, as well as other areas of the Yahoo network, where the brand is reinforced and targeted to users with key characteristics (high HHI, active investors, etc.).
-- Adrienne Skinner, Yahoo!
The Harris Direct campaign was one of the very first Full Screen Superstital ads created. When Unicast was launching the format, we sought participation and insight from some of the industry's best. The creative team at Modem Media stepped up to the plate. The result was/is a stronger and more compelling Harris Direct message presented to consumers without any distraction -- Harris Direct has 100% share of their attention with the full-screen execution.
-- Allie Savarino, Senior Vice President, Unicast
In the bland, unemotional and detached world of financial services, signs of life, balance and humanity are ever strong. In this week’s COTW, we provide proof that there is more to brokerage advertising than buttons, 100% direct-response-focused creative and bottom-line messaging. Modem Media taps into the consumer insight that behind every investment decision is a deeply human motivation centered largely on the real important considerations in life: family. Couple this with the continuation of the company’s communication efforts to humanize the business of investing through its “direct investor” campaign -- spearheaded by Elsie Lee -- and you have a different kind of advertising campaign -- the kind we’ve all been looking for.