Project Description

Repositioning a custodian as a strategic partner — and building the brand platform that changed how independent advisors saw TDAI, their competitors, and themselves.

Brand Context

TD Ameritrade Institutional held the #2 position serving independent Registered Investment Advisors despite being outspent by its competition 20 to 1. The brand punched well above its weight with advisors who knew it — but the category itself had a trust problem.

Advisors didn’t fully trust the large custodians. Charles Schwab and Fidelity both operated retail brokerages incentivized to solicit the very clients of the RIAs they served on the institutional side — a structural conflict advisors could feel every day. TDAI was built differently. It didn’t run a retail brokerage competing with its advisors. It had always been an advocate for independence.

The problem wasn’t the offering. It was the story. TDAI’s operations and marketing diminished the brand’s own edge. The company showed up to the market like a utility when it had every right to show up like a movement.

The Challenge

How do you build a bond with a niche audience in a highly-regulated space — and get advisors to see a custodian as a partner, not a vendor?

The work demanded more than a campaign. It required repositioning the company internally and externally — so that the brand, the sales motion, the organizational structure, and the advisor experience all told the same story.

Strategic Insight

Scale at a personal cost, or personal service at scale.

Charles Schwab and Fidelity were pursuing scale — at a cost advisors felt every time their own clients got solicited. TDAI was doing the opposite: delivering personal service, at scale, to the advisors it served. The reframe gave us a positioning no competitor could honestly claim.

On the side of independent advisors. Not a custodian. A partner. The first institutional investment brand to behave as more than a custodian — a strategic ally that put advisors first.

Creative Execution

The platform rolled out across four integrated work streams — each one reinforcing the idea that TDAI didn’t just say it was on the side of advisors; it operated that way.

  • Organizational Strategy. We evolved TDAI to an agile working model with a centralized intake and planning process, consolidating multiple disconnected marketing plans into one master plan organized by level of impact and investment. The shift changed the internal perception of marketing from service provider to business growth engine.

  • Brand Platform. A breakthrough marketing platform built around a single, ownable idea — helping advisors see past wherever they are, and showing them the better side of advising.

  • Sales Enablement. A custom sales tool and prospecting system that put the brand platform into the hands of every relationship manager, enabling personalized outreach at speed while staying on-brand, on-legal, and on-strategy.

  • Event Activation. A full brand takeover at TDAI LINC, the company’s flagship advisor conference — turning the environment itself into the most persuasive expression of the positioning.

Results

  • +3.3% increase in brand consideration — a reversal from the -6.7% decrease in the period prior to campaign launch

  • +36% YOY growth in net new client assets since campaign launch, vs. the same period prior

  • +50% increase in drivers of consideration among TDAI’s primary target — potential breakaway and wirehouse brokers

  • Held the #2 position in the custodial RIA market against competitors outspending TDAI 20 to 1

Reflection

The most interesting thing about the TDAI work wasn’t the campaign. It was that the repositioning changed how the company behaved, not just how it looked. When sales enablement, event design, organizational structure, and advertising all tell the same story, the brand stops being something the marketing team owns. It becomes something the business runs on.

Being on the side of independent advisors wasn’t a tagline. It was an operating principle made visible.

Role: Head of Strategy · Phenomenon

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