The goal was to shake up the category and tell Investors that in fact it wasn’t difficult to invest yourself through E*TRADE.

We also wanted to get everyone excited and talking about a category that was the poster child for the bad economy. We wanted Outtakes to add fuel to Baby’s fire. As described, Outtakes was cut together from the footage that was left on the presentation room floor – the dirty, silly, irreverent stuff that we couldn’t show on TV. A week before the Super Bowl, we posted Outtakes online, and leaked it to the press. The response was off the charts.

Outtakes was a massive success on the Super Bowl (#1 by The Wall Street Journal, AdAge etc); online over 4 million views on YouTube. Baby generated PR worth an estimated $10 million, 800+ media mentions on shows like Jay Leno, The View, E!, The Today Show and ESPN. The baby has a total of over 20 million hits online (ads, parodies, Outtakes combined) in the last year, over 10 000 fans on Facebook, 9000 blog mentions and traffic on the E*TRADE site has increased 28% as a direct result. More accounts opened at E*TRADE than any time in the company’s history.