E-Trade’s Talking Baby Is Fired: What Next? [Watch]

The E-Trade talking baby ads have been a feature of the Super Bowl breaks since 2008. Each year, E-trade created a new commercial with the talking baby promoting their services.

But E-trade has a new management team, and they have decided that the talking baby is not so appealing any more – so they are replacing him with a cat!

The latest ad of the investment company starts with the adorable infant – who looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth – but talks like characters in movies about Wall Street.

In the commercial we meet a singing cat named Beanie. The baby does not take kindly to the warbling feline and walks out in disgust, saying, “That’s it, I’m done. I’m out of here. Amateurs.”

E-Trade has confirmed that the talking baby is no longer going to feature in their ads, and they are planning a totally different campaign.

E-Trade launched the first talking baby ad during the 2008 Super Bowl. At that time, online investing was a rarity. The logic behind using a talking baby was to show that that trading stock on their website was so simple that even a baby could make money doing it.

Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of branding firm Landor Associates, said “It served its purpose when it first launched, to make it seem like anyone could trade online. But now online trading is so common the baby has lost its mission.”

E- Trade has had a management shake-up, naming banking industry veteran Paul Idzik as CEO in January 2013. Last summer he fired the chief marketing officer and transferred their advertising account from Grey to Ogilvy & Mather.

The future direction of their advertising and marketing is still under wraps, but Allen Adamson says that the talking baby will be a tough act to follow with something as memorable.

Advertising in the Super Bowl breaks has become a marketing phenomenon. With an average viewing audience of over 100 million people, the amounts demanded for advertising space increase annually.

In 2013, the average cost of a 30-second commercial was around $4 million!

Indeed, many viewers are now more interested in the advertisements than they are in the game itself.

And they’re really going to miss E-Trades talking baby.