E*Trade Ditches Its Famous Talking Baby After featuring talking babies in its much-beloved ad campaigns for seven years, E*Trade is moving in a new direction.
By Geoff Weiss
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Hoping to take a more "scientific" stance in its ad messaging, online brokerage service E*Trade is giving its infamously loudmouthed baby the pink slip.
For his farewell spot, the baby becomes maddeningly upstaged by a singing cat named Beanie -- upon which he launches his cell phone into the camera, cracking its lens. "Diane, pull the car around," he growls.
A link at the end of the commercial directs viewers to his Facebook fan page at babyquits.com, which currently counts over 60,000 likes. The 30-second ad made its debut during the NCAA March Madness tournament.
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"We want something that better reflects our present and where we are going," the company's new chief marketing officer, Liza Landsman, told Reuters.
Landsman joined the company in May of last year, replacing CMO Nick Utton, who conceived the E*Trade baby campaign. The company also changed advertising agencies last year, fanning speculation that the talking baby would soon be put to bed.
She declined to describe the new campaign specifically, but confirmed that ads would appear mostly on online platforms -- including Yahoo Finance, Google, Bing and Facebook -- as opposed to on television, given the nature of its digital clientele.
Landsman told Reuters that the revamped ads will be as iconic and witty as its talking toddlers -- even if they likely won't be starring Beanie, the singing cat. E*Trade's ad budget is also up from last year, she added.
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