Company turns to end investors … to help advisors
Mackenzie Investments’ latest ad campaign, “Listen to Your Money: It’s time to invest”, is not only trying to raise its profile with investors, but drive the $180 billion of Canadian pandemic savings to advisors to get it back in the market.
“Mackenzie’s primary customer, our audience, is the advisor, so this campaign was novel for us because we’ve never gone out to talk directly to the investor,” Leisha Roche, Mackenzie’s Senior Vice-President and Head of Marketing, told Wealth Professional.
“But, it was a perfect time, coming out of the pandemic, since investors have accumulated a lot of money in savings since they haven’t been travelling or spending as much on luxury goods.”
Given that Mackenzie’s purpose, which it launched last year, is “creating a more invested world together – investors, advisors, and Mackenzie”, she said, “we thought this was a perfect opportunity for us to go out there in a massive way and really encourage investors by saying, ‘if your money is sitting in a savings account right now, it’s not really working as hard as it could. So, call your advisor and get your money back in the market.”
Roche noted that these pandemic savings are a global phenomenon, but Canada’s $180 billion is the equivalent of about $6,000 per Canadian, which they may just be sitting on.
“It’s just getting people to think, top of mind, call your advisor and invest your money or getting new people, who haven’t actually started to think about investing but have all these savings, to actually start investing,” she said.
Roche said Mackenzie wants to use its large voice to not only increase its name-recognition, but help the industry and advisors. So, it’s just launched phase one of the campaign, the 13-week “brand campaign”, on national TV (news, sports, and Survivor), plus YouTube and other digital platforms. It will also launch ads on ETFs In May and June and sustainable investing and retirement from September to December. Joel McHale, star of Netflix’s Community, is featured in them.
While she’s not sharing the metrics for how Mackenzie will define a “successful” campaign, Roche said it wants to have “investors see the ads and go, ‘Yeah, I recognize who the ads are from, and it made me change my behaviour. It also made me have a stronger connection to Mackenzie. So, those are more the qualitative metrics that we would look to.”
“We really want to create a movement. We want positive momentum across the investor audience,” said Roche, noting Mackenzie will also track the response with their advisor perception study. “The hope is – fingers crossed – if that is positive, then maybe we’ll put even more money into it in the back half of year. But, you want to see if there’s traction and then react accordingly.”
