E-Trade Super Bowl Commercial - The Cute Baby Hook

This year’s E-Trade Super Bowl commercial featured a talking baby sitting in front of the computer doing stock trades. The commercial was a huge success for E-Trade on several fronts.

The Cute Baby Hook

In my last article I described the Humor Hook ad strategy for viewer engagement. While this E-Trade commercial certainly includes humor, it’s main “hook” is what I refer to as “The Cute Baby Hook” - it works as an ad strategy because everyone loves cute babies. Just like the Humor Hook, The Cute Baby Hook creates positive associations with the company product. But it also runs the same risk: the cute baby might overshadow the product and make it forgettable.

E-Trade solved this problem very simply by making it’s product (online stock trades) the main activity of the baby. The humor hook combines merges with the cute baby hook in the very activity that E-Trade wants you to remember: online stock trading.

Do you see how this is a brilliant move by E-Trade? Everyone is going to remember the cute talking baby and what the cute talking baby was doing. He was doing an adult activity (which contributes to the humor hook) which is the activity being sold.

So not only do we associate online stock trading with the positive attributes of cute babies (forget the diapers, E-Trade didn’t include them), but we are also being reminded of the simplicity of online trading (if a baby can do it, so can I).

Brilliant use of the humor and cute baby hooks… brilliant work from E-Trade all around.