By Tom Bradley

A Steadyhand advertising campaign is starting today. It’s pretty extensive, but not all of you will see it. That’s because the magazine, newspaper, television and on-line ads are targeted at Southern Ontario (more on that later).

I never thought we’d be advertising in the conventional sense, and many of our clients and readers didn’t either, so some background is in order.

The reasoning goes like this:

  • We are passionate about what we are doing and want to be successful enough to change the landscape in the industry...for the better.
  • After two and a half years, we have enough experience and feedback to know that what we’re doing is of value to investors.
  • Despite the great support from our clients and fans, only 0.0001% of the Canadian population know we exist. We want that to be higher.

As you’d expect from us, the campaign is a little cheeky (see preview) and hits hard on the issues we care about, namely over-diversification, closet indexing, transparency and fees. Along with the ads, you’ll see that our home page has been updated, incorporating the creative from the campaign. While some of you will miss Koda and my fidgeting, it was time to move on.

Because we don’t have a ‘Big 5 bank’ budget, we had to focus our efforts. We chose to start with Toronto and the surrounding area because (1) it’s the biggest market in Canada, (2) we’ve had success there already, (3) my Globe & Mail articles give us added profile there and (4) it’s where we get the biggest bang for our buck with the media. Depending on how successful the campaign is, it is our hope that we can roll it out to our other targeted markets – our home town (where we’re not well enough known yet), Calgary and Winnipeg.

This is an important step for us and we haven’t taken it lightly. Our business plan always called for a more active promotional effort, but we’ve advanced it by a year or two in light of the market volatility, the industry’s continued excesses (read: opportunity) and investors’ need for a steady hand.

For those of you who see the ads, we’d love to hear your feedback...good and bad. It will help shape how and where we go from here.