unBoxed 2023: How TD Bank joined the investment trend with young adults on Twitch

Between 2020 and 2021, TD Bank, the sixth largest financial institution in North America with branches serving more than 22 million customers, saw that a majority of new accounts were being opened by younger adult audiences. Specifically, adult Gen Z and millennial audiences in Canada were opening more than 60% of accounts with TD Bank.¹

“Our research showed that there was a niche market out there for a simple, easy-to-use, low-cost trading app for those who were starting their investing journey in life. For instance, about 80% of adult Gen Z audiences did not have an investment account at that time,” Michael Letsche, vice president of integrated marketing and planning wealth and investing, TD Canada.²

TD Bank realized this was a perfect opportunity to introduce this younger adult audience to the world of investing in an easy, valuable, and trusted way with their newly refreshed app, TD Easy Trade, an investing tool tailored for their customers in Canada.

TD Bank wanted to build consideration for their TD Easy Trade app with adult Gen Z and millennial audiences.

“We knew we had to reach this audience in authentic ways to build trust and awareness about the Easy Trade app,” said Letsche. “So, we leaned into the ‘you don’t have to be an expert’ value proposition that was very relatable to this audience, and planned a strategy around key partnerships that could bring this to life.”

In order to build excitement for the newly refreshed app, TD Bank took a full-funnel approach: The first step was to create an awareness campaign. TD Bank wanted to showcase the Easy Trade app to adult Gen Z and millennial audiences and build consideration. The brand’s goal was to show investing could be easy through the app and help humanize the experience. With the help of their creative partners, TD Bank created a campaign that highlighted these benefits. Once the campaign was designed, TD Bank reached out to Amazon Ads to help the brand connect with relevant audiences.

“Amazon was an important partner because through Twitch we could connect with customers we weren’t reaching elsewhere,” Aparna Menon, senior vice president of marketing at TD Bank, said during a keynote session at unBoxed 2023. “We knew this was a leaned-in audience spending more than two hours a day streaming and interacting at the same time.”

For the Twitch campaign, TD Bank created influencer online videos that ran on Twitch and other digital channels ahead of brand’s 2022 Super Bowl spot.

The campaign was a big success, according to TD Bank. The brand saw a significant lift across all brand metrics. For example, ad awareness improved by 35% and brand awareness increased by 28%.³ Finally, overall sales increased significantly. These promising results weren’t the end for TD Bank; in fact, it was just the beginning.

“Equipped with such strong results, we were then confident to build further campaigns through expanding the partnership with Amazon Ads,” Menon said.

Snapshot of the TD Easy Trade app.

For the brand’s next campaign flight in 2023, TD Bank went even bigger. The brand used Twitch to build awareness with takeovers and integrations with content creators, and amplified the campaign across Amazon Streaming TV ads to tap into key audiences like entertainment enthusiasts.

The combination of all of these elements brought the brand results that exceeded their benchmarks by 1.8x.⁴ Additionally, the campaign was ranked as one of the top three best-performing Twitch campaigns in Canada.⁵ Finally, the brand saw that there was only 1% of overlap of unique audiences between Twitch and Streaming TV ads, meaning TD Bank was able to deliver on their reach objectives with minimal duplication of dollars spent.⁶

This campaign experience helped TD Bank remain consistent with their full-funnel strategy, building consumer consideration in the upper funnel, and then driving consumers down through the acquisition funnel to help achieve conversion and growth.

Part of the brand’s acquisition strategy is remarketing to audiences who have seen the Streaming TV ads and Twitch ads to help increase the likelihood for conversion. Although Easy Trade app is a Canadian product and the campaign TD Bank launched was specifically for customers in Canada, the campaign is being considered for other regions.

“TD Bank is a global brand,” said Menon, “and we have an extremely ambitious growth agenda for the U.S., which means we will be bringing these strategies across the border and will continue to grow the collaboration across North America.”