TD Ameritrade
Institutional

TD Ameritrade Institutional needed to build a real marketing engine — one that could move a famously hard to reach audience: financial advisors. The question was how to reach them in a way that would actually land.

Strategic discovery — interviews, workshops, deep audience work — surfaced the insight that changed everything: advisors didn't trust big financial brands, any of them. But they trusted their peers implicitly. That single finding became the architecture for everything that followed.

We built a marketing ecosystem designed around peer voice at every stage of the lifecycle. The centerpiece was a suite of highly produced video stories — real advisors, real practices, real outcomes — that gave prospects the thing no brand message could: recognition. Someone who looks like me, built what I want to build, and chose TDAI to support it.

The program expanded across promotional campaigns, email nurtures, assessments, and an expansive multi-media content library — all of it anchored in peer credibility. It worked. It accelerated sales, changed how marketing functioned inside the business, gave marketing a much larger voice at the leadership table, and earned recognition from the industry along the way.

Several years in, we had accumulated something valuable: a deep understanding of exactly who these advisors were and what kind of support they needed. Which meant we could also see where the program was falling short — what pain points we weren't addressing yet, and what kinds of support didn't exist yet. The opportunity was to fix both at once, and further accelerate sales in the process.

The Year of You campaign started with a creative provocation — what if we could make every advisor feel like the campaign was built specifically for them? An entertaining, highly personalized live-action video invited prospects into a detailed assessment that surfaced individual care-abouts and fine-tuned everything that followed: which content they received, in what sequence, framed around their specific goals and needs. Evergreen content became personal content. The program got smarter the more it ran.

And it didn't stop at conversion. Months later, a second chapter checked back in — recalibrating to wherever the advisor was now, not where they'd been. New pain points, new needs, new content to match. A relationship that kept earning its place.