I’ve Got The Brains, You’ve Got The Looks

I'm really getting sick of investment commercials. I know, you have to expect this sort of thing at tax time, but now it seems like they're going year round.

I especially hate those Questrade ads where they have highly assertive customers talking back to their brokers. The intended result is that were supposed to feel empowered to rebel against our brokers. But for me, the feeling I get is sympathy for the brokers. Poor guys, having to defend themselves against people who are surprised to find that mutual funds have fees. The fact that they don't lose their temper shows some remarkable restraint. I think i'll invest with them. Where do they sell Strawman Funds?

The Wealth Simple ads have a bunch of people in the target demographic talking about investing. At first, it was kind of refreshing: they talked about money in a relatable, down-to-earth way. They managed to sound like overwhelmed consumers, without sounding like the unrealistically dense idiots normalizing stupidity on most commercials.

But as the campaign has gone on, they’re increasingly being smartass know-it-alls. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were showing people learning about investing and thus getting more confident, but instead they just seem to be getting more arrogant but still clueless.

I mean there’s that one where the woman talks about how you don’t want to invest in big institutions, because everyone knows that large organizations are crumbling dinosaurs going nowhere, really, just trust us, the upstart investment company. Then she says you want to invest in the “disrupters,” a word she surely learned from an online TED Talk. Has she ever thought about how may startups go nowhere? I know millennials hate being characterized as inexperienced and unworldly, but I know they’re old enough to remember the dot com crash.

And now there’s a new ad, where they tell you how your money can make more money, and that money can make more money, etc. It leaves me depressed that they feel the need to explain compound interest to people. I guess it’s good that they’re trying to clean up after our education system. But mainly I’m suspicious of it. Why are they specifically targeting the least knowledgeable segment of the audience?