Responses by Steve Persico, chief creative officer; Robin Soukvilay, senior art director; and Evan Wallis, writer, Leo Burnett Toronto.
Background: “Canadians in their 20s and 30s have become interested in investing more than ever thanks to the hype created by cryptocurrencies, meme stocks and investing brands targeting them,” says Steve Persico. “While some are willing to jump in headfirst, many still don’t feel confident about investing, not knowing how or where to start. TD Easy Trade is an app specifically designed to help people learn and invest simultaneously. We wanted novice investors to know that TD Easy Trade is for them.”
Design thinking: “We wanted to debunk the myth that investing is something only for professionals or risk-takers,” Persico says, “and let novice and wannabe investors know you don’t need to be an expert to start investing: you can learn and take it at your pace with TD. By reflecting to people their mixed feelings about investing—being interested but unsure about it, for example—we could connect with them on a human level. You can imagine people thinking, ‘That’s exactly how I feel. That app is exactly what I need.’”
Challenges: “To give the brand the world-class creative film it deserves,” says Persico. “Like every brief, the bar is high. That, and short timelines.”
Favorite details: “This was a labor of love for the details: the fun stuff, like wardrobe, locations, edit points, music and performance,” Persico notes. “Thank goodness our creative team and production partners are so talented. If we didn’t nail the expressions and mood, the spiraling feeling and the sense of being overwhelmed, this spot would have never connected with people on an emotional level. To me, its strength is in the execution. In the wrong hands, it would have just been a logical piece of film. But in the right hands, you feel the story.”
Visual influences: “For the uninitiated, there are visceral reactions to what being an investor must be like,” says Robin Soukvilay. “The success of our work hinged on acknowledging how that mental spiral can become a barrier to getting started. We took our inspiration from pop culture, news, entertainment and that person we all know who’s all about the hustle. If you love movies, you’ll especially enjoy seeing visual influences from films like The Wolf of Wall Street, American Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, Rocky and, of course, Wall Street.”
Time constraints: “We knew the success of Becoming an Investor hinged on a frenetic edit that would need to draw on a lot of footage to get right,” says Evan Wallis. “This meant that from the start, we were ready for an ambitious, demanding shoot that was very much constrained by time. There are, after all, only so many hours in a day. The final film results from the directors and production team squeezing every minute out of every moment they had on set—the changing room scene, for example, was set up and finished in the final thirty minutes of the first day. We all dreamed about what this spot could be, but it was time that dictated what was possible.”
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