“It was critical to me,” he recalled. “I said to myself, ‘If this doesn’t work, Tisdalle, you know you’re toast. Your career’s over.’ But at least you’ll go down in flames.”
His trust in Fearless Girl’s components, however, outweighed his concerns: “I felt confident. And sometimes you just have to trust your own instinct.”
Tisdalle grounded his green-light decision in his comfort with his agency partner: “I had enjoyed a very long working relationship with the team at McCann/New York prior to going to State Street Global Advisors. I handpicked the team I wanted to work with.”
Critical to the Wall Street installation was the look of the statue, meaning not just the posture of confrontation, but the look on the young girl’s face.
She’s not making a protest. She’s not shaking her fist at the bull. She, instead, is exuding confidence. She knows who she is. She’s optimistic about the future. She’s standing there with her fearless-girl pose. She’s ready to jump in to contribute her unique talents and gifts to the economy.”
Outside of McCann and marketing, there were concerns from the State Street Global Advisors C-suite – the kind of apprehension that could have undermined the project.
The question kept popping up from the leadership team: “Since when are we in the statue-building business to begin with?”
Tisdalle's response: “We’re the third-largest asset-management firm that no one has ever heard anything about. What people really don’t know much about is our mission of helping investors achieve their financial objectives while enabling social and economic progress.”
When Tisdalle signed on he had to answer two questions:
- “How do we make our brand stand out?”
- “How do we stand for something that separates us from all of our competitors?”
That led to more questions:
- “Are you going to lead?”
- “Are you going to follow?”
Tisdalle decided to lead and, with that, came the most daunting query of all:
- “What are we going to lead with?”
The response was in the enterprise’s DNA: “At the very foundation of our investment philosophy is something we call ‘asset stewardship, a simple set of principles that look at protecting the long-term investment objectives of our investors with three fundamental aspects:
- “independent board governance;
- “environmental sustainability;
- “greater gender diversity within the leadership of companies that we invest in.”
The third point was the driver that guided State Street in a fearless direction.
“We’re finding that companies with women in leadership perform a lot better than those without over the long term.”
Enter the four-foot-eight-inch 280-pound Fearless Girl staring down the traditions of Wall Street.
“The brief was really simple. It was to create an experience that could communicate this in a novel way for just a one or two-week period.
The rest is history. Fearless Girl overstayed her 14-day lease and will soon be relocated to face the New York Stock Exchange, buffeted by public enthusiasm and a stack of marketing metrics that carry a value somewhere between $27 million and $38 million.
Three months prior to the installation of Fearless Girl, State Street share of voice was 7.8%. The three weeks post- installation that shot up to 37.4%.”On Wall Street, “within just the first three weeks we saw a 170% increase in the daily trading volume of our gender diversity ETF. We also saw a 450% increase in the page views on strategies that pertain to gender diversity investing.”
And State Street Global Advisors garnered all that for a marketing investment of $250,000.
“I was confident,” he said. “And I was willing to live and die by it.”
The stories behind the world's best campaigns are always interesting.
You can read even more about Fearless Girl on WARC.
- eMarketer is out with global ad spending predictions: In short, global spending is forecast to grow by 5%.
- CBH is amazing and The Statesman ran a very cool piece on them last week. One of my fav parts: why Boise has so many 3 car garages and how they use them.
- A very cool piece of innovation from agency R/GA to automatically broadcast sports from players’ shoes and such. Very popular in high school sports and made possible by the LA Dodgers Accelerator program. Go Dodgers :)
- Terrific interview with Jony Ive of Apple, who doesn’t do many interviews: “I don’t look at watches for their relationship to popular culture, which I know is so much of the fun – but rather as somehow the distillation of craft, ingenuity, miniaturization, and of the art of making.”
- For all you podcast fanatics, here’s a good list of the best of 2018.
- Google launches a new news thing. As they say it: “Today we’re rolling out an all new Google News, which uses the best of artificial intelligence to find the best of human intelligence—the great reporting done by journalists around the globe.”
- I’ve always try to read anything about the iconic Anna Wintour; Here’s an important story about using her influence on The Cut.
- 98% of us Americans have skin in the game, but the country’s decisions are being made by the 2% who don’t have any skin in the game.
Have a great week, looking forward to 40 years.