How Do You Sell a New Stock Exchange? IEX Makes an Appeal to …
This week’s cover story recounts the origins of IEX, a new stock exchange that hopes to level the playing field among investors, let some disinfecting sunshine in on the shadowy world of high-frequency trading and spur Wall Street to follow its lead. But a non-engineering, non-algorithm-writing type might be forgiven for finding it hard to understand the technological and financial details of the story, even with Michael Lewis’s guidance. That’s a problem for a new operation like IEX: How do you get the public excited when your product consists, in part, of a shoe box full of fiber-optic cable that adds microseconds to trading times?
One possible solution is to sell your stock exchange the way advertisers of late have sold cars, jeans or soda — by trying to get at something authentic. IEX asked Olivier Bernier, a director and self-professed Wall Street newbie, and his production company Rota6 to condense its philosophy into two minutes. The resulting “branded documentary” features an interracial couple, a newborn, a soundtrack with strings and imagery meant to evoke the American dream. (Bernier is French Canadian-American, a good match for the “Canadian nice” mentality of IEX.) We had some questions for Bernier about the ad, titled “Opportunity Now.”
How do you sell something as hard to explain as a stock exchange?
I had a fear that anything we did would be rejected by someone like me. We didn’t want to make a pharmaceutical ad, with actors with plastered-on smiles. Whatever we did had to feel really authentic.
The message is that what the stock market stands for is deeply American. It stands for equal economic opportunity — the fact that I could go to the stock market and get rich just like anybody else. But that’s currently broken. The ad became about the fact that we all deserve a fair shot, we all deserve an equal economic opportunity. That’s capitalism at its best.
The video will live on IEX’s website, and there are no plans to run it on television. So who is going to see it?
The intended direct audience is anyone who is invested in any way in the market because I think they’ve all been victims for awhile, without even knowing. We wanted to inspire a secondary audience, who is anyone who might not have invested at all, to tell them: “Listen, maybe now isn’t a good time in the stock market. Maybe you think Wall Street after 2008 is a really evil place. But it can get better, and you should pay attention to it.”
So the message is directed to the Everyman, primarily. Do you think that larger firms considering working with IEX will see it? Do you think it will speak to them?
That would be the dream for me. A lot of companies have forgotten who they are working for. If it made a C.E.O. look internally and say: “What are we doing? Are we serving the right person? Are we serving the shareholders or the customers?” I think markets should work for everyday people.
You mentioned that authenticity was important to the ad, and that all of the people in the commercial are nonactors. Does that include the woman who had just given birth at the end?
That’s actually a great friend of mine.
We didn’t want to hire actors. We didn’t want to stage anything. So even with our limited budget, we decided to find real people. That’s why the piece feels really authentic. We drove 800 miles in five days to get these stories. We drove to upstate New York, all around New Jersey, Brooklyn, Staten Island, the Bronx.
A lot of people turned us down because they didn’t really understand what we were doing and we didn’t know how to explain it properly. As soon as we said “Wall Street,” they said, “I’m not interested.”
Did you draw inspiration from any other commercials?
[IEX] first sent me the “Farmer” commercial from the Super Bowl and said “Can you do this for IEX?” And I was like, “Jeez, that commercial is pretty amazing.” That was the starting point he gave me. I’d never met a company, especially off of Wall Street, that wanted to incite that kind of emotional reaction.
Did you have to do research before you began this project, or are you well-versed in the ways of Wall Street?
Before we went into the initial meeting with IEX, I did my research, and I asked some friends, “Can you please explain to me what a dark pool is? Because it sounds scary.” At the time, I didn’t really know what a market was. I knew what the New York Stock Exchange was, so I thought I was going to walk into a room with a bunch of guys yelling. I was afraid to pitch a bad idea and get my head bitten off. But it was completely the opposite — they are great guys.
This video is part of IEX’s broader campaign, “I Am an Investor.” Are you an investor?
I have a Roth IRA. I’ve been afraid to invest for a long time. And it’s not that I think the market’s going to crash, I just feel there’s no way to win. Nobody gets a fair shot. People have a really bad perception of Wall Street, and Wall Street did that to themselves.
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How Do You Sell a New Stock Exchange? IEX Makes an Appeal to …
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