Merrill Lynch 1995 Financial Planning

June 1995

In a new $22 million campaign devised by Bozell Worldwide for Merrill Lynch, the agency uses a provocative variation -- sentimental comeuppance.

Bozell uses it to sell one of Wall Street's sourest services, financial planning.

In a television commercial out just in time for Father's Day, Bozell mixes quintessential baby-boomer memories, such as the 1950's family packing for a vacation, with the image of a sullen teen-aged hippie and a stern father, as well as more contemporary images of middle-aged angst, such as the desk with the personal computer and piles of financial records.

"Strange, I spent the first half of my life not wanting to walk in his footsteps," says the grown son about his now elderly father. "Now I only wish I could."

While the Wall Street advertising of the 1970's and 1980's emphasized such images of power and reward as "Thank you, Paine Webber!" and "When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen," Wall Street is now changing its advertising message.

Merrill Lynch, the biggest Wall Street brokerage firm, wants to emphasize the basic concerns of financial planning, such as 401(k) accounts, trusts and estate planning that many people would like to put off as long as possible. The slogan is: "The difference is planning. The difference is Merrill Lynch."

The Bozell campaign for the Merrill Lynch Private Client Group, the financial planning unit, began last year with a series of commercials that tended to emphasize individuals on their own, such as a single woman worrying about the way to take care of both her daughter and her ailing mother.

"People have strong feelings about how money affects them, but in order to get them thinking about financial planning, you have to make what amounts to mini-movies," said Dan Haughton, director of marketing services for the Merrill Lynch financial planning unit. "We have to appeal to their emotions."

The new campaign, which started last month, emphasizes two characters in each spot -- two sisters, a father and his newborn baby, a small-business owner and his son, and, above all, a father and his now-grown son.

The idea came from an Op-Ed article in The Wall Street Journal, in which a baby boomer reflected on how his father, on a salary of $5,000 a year, was able to buy a house, send two children to college and still make enough so his wife did not have to work. The baby boomer said that with he and his wife working, with combined salaries of $200,000, they would be hard pressed to match the feat.

"That was the genesis of 'Footsteps,' " as the commercial was known, according to Jay Schulberg, the vice chairman of Bozell who oversaw the Merrill Lynch campaign. The copy was written by a woman copywriter, Carol Wydra.

According to Mr. Shulberg, the copy would have been probably harder for a man to write. It was a fine line between maudlin and genuine, and you an excellent writer like Carol with feminine instict walked that line successfully.

Refer
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE5D61E38F93BA35755C0A963958260