By Weld Royal

During Super Bowl 2024, Morgan Stanley's E*Trade ad featured " Picklebabies," (pickleball playing toddlers) discussing financial preparedness. By many accounts, the memorable spot worked. The campaign drove a 73% year-over-year increase in E*Trade site visits, and a 14% increase in gross new accounts, according to MMA Global, a marketing trade group.

Two years later, no wealth or brokerage firms are returning to advertise at the big game. Despite the $8 million cost for a 30-second spot, inventory sold out in the fall of 2025, according to NBCU. Doritos, Uber Eats, and a handful of Anheuser-Busch InBev brands, including Bud, are among the game's biggest advertisers.

Morgan Stanley's E*Trade Super Bowl success now looks less like a blueprint for turning fans into clients than a historical outlier. As ad costs soar and younger investors grow more skeptical of mass-market financial messaging, wealth and brokerage firms are abandoning advertising's biggest stage.

Most wealth and brokerage firms struggle to justify the return on a Super Bowl ad, says Scott Smith, a senior analyst at Cerulli Associates. The 30-second spot may result in a glimmer of interest, but doesn't generate the trust required to form advisory relationships. "Boring wins, " he says, are what create incremental trust and positive outcomes for advisors -- not clicks or QR-code scans.

Face-to-face. Former Buffalo Bills offensive tackle Walter Stith, now a financial advisor and director in Morgan Stanley's Global Sports and Entertainment Division, echoes that view. He remembers the Picklebabies ad well but says promoting financial literacy and using a "boots on the ground" approach are better ways to attract new clients.

For example, Stith spoke directly to a recent Pittsburgh Steelers' rookie class -- players sitting in a room -- about managing money and building a legacy. They have little to learn from "a talking baby playing pickleball," he says. "But I can speak to them from the lens of somebody who was in the locker room."

Financial literacy advocate Jedidiah Collins, a former fullback for the Detroit Lions and New Orleans Saints, founded his company, Money Vehicle, to help young adults make better financial decisions. He says the high school students, college athletes, and professional athletes he works with don't simply ignore mass-market ads -- they're skeptical of the institutions behind them. He believes a Super Bowl ad doesn't just fail to convert clients, it may undermine the credibility a firm is trying to build.

Given the prevalence of AI for learning financial basics, the advisor role is shifting toward deeper, more personalized guidance, he says. That's difficult for a 30-second broadcast spot to convey.

As a result, firms are reallocating dollars away from mass-market advertising and toward much niche opportunities that are likely to generate trust. Some may try working with social media influencers. And several large firms, including Morgan Stanley, are using their relationships with employers who hire them to run their workplace retirement plans to generate new prospects for advisors.

Wilson's approach. Brandon Wilson is a wealth advisor with WFA, a wealth management firm based in Shreveport, La. Until recently, he played defense for the Cincinnati Bengals. Back when Wilson's team squared off against the Rams in Super Bowl 2022, E*Trade ran another ad featuring its famous babies during the game.

Back then, Wilson wanted to hire a wealth manager. He had saved all of his earnings, but didn't have a guaranteed contract and wanted to make sure his savings would last. To find an advisor, he turned to a trusted platform -- the NFL Players website -- and chose an advisor from the list of preapproved firms.

"At the time, I didn't know anything about interviewing an advisor so I went online, found someone on the players' site, and I started working with them," he recalls. That relationship led him to pursue a career in financial advice after he retired from football. He says social media is his preferred vehicle for generating trust with prospective clients.

Mitchell Caplan, CEO of Willow Wealth, served as CEO of E*Trade before the firm's acquisition by Morgan Stanley, and oversaw about a decade of Super Bowl ads. He says financial firms generally are avoiding the sort of irreverent ads that entertain, but may make potential clients uncomfortable putting real money with the firm.

Caplan sees investor education as the key to success at Willow Wealth, a private markets investing platform. His firm's marketing is meant to answer potential clients' fundamental questions about private markets. "The way you break through the barrier of distrust is to educate," he says. "Make them feel like you're part of the solution to making better informed decisions."

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 06, 2026 08:25 ET (13:25 GMT)

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