While volatility in the markets may be making life hard for some, Nasdaq is hoping to show how companies on its exchange help make life easier and more enjoyable. The 17 vignettes of its “Move Life Forward,” television ad campaign will be in rotation on CNBC, Fox News, Fox Business Channel, and CNN. (The campaign’s print component launched earlier in the year.) Here, we take a look at what Nasdaq wants to you to know—and what the real story is.

What Nasdaq Wants You to Know

The general message of the ads is that the diverse and powerful companies listed on Nasdaq improve lives, and Nasdaq itself is one of these companies. “We are the most innovative stock market that exists, and we are the home to those innovative companies,” says John Jacobs, Nasdaq’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer. The exchange invented electronic trading 36 years ago and was the first to use brand-building advertising, according to the company.

Since Nasdaq is best known as a home for tech companies, the ads nod to the sector by including eBay, Amazon, Research in Motion, and Adobe. But the TV spots also feature such widely recognized brick-and-mortar listees as Starbucks, Costco, and Bed Bath & Beyond. (View the ads here.)

Each 15-second commercial in the new campaign, created in collaboration with the Durham, North Carolina, ad agency McKinney, features a different listed company and illustrates how it improves the lives of primarily middle- to upper-middle-class people. In past campaigns, Nasdaq highlighted three to eight companies in each ad.

The commercials open with a short scene meant to illustrate a benefit that the company brings and end with a series of logos and taglines. Here’s the Starbucks ad:

A young office worker walks into a drab, empty break room. Rather then grab a cup of the office’s usual brew, he spies a full cup of Starbucks on the table and pours it into his own mug. Text pops onto the screen in a style reminiscent of a stock market ticker, showing Monday mornings up 3.61 percent.
 
“The campaign always uses the ticker up or down symbol to express an emotion or thought based on the scene,” says Liz Paradise, senior vice president and group creative director at McKinney.

Then the stakes rise. A high-powered female executive walks in, and clearly it was her Starbucks. Fortunately, the thief escapes the break room before getting busted. (For a campaign meant to target C-suite executives, it’s a bit ironic that the upper-echelon exec gets the short end of the stick.) Starbucks’ logo appears on a white background with the message “Moves life forward. Lists on Nasdaq.” After that, Nasdaq’s logo appears with the tagline “Trade up.”

The branding campaign is meant to influence where businesses choose to list when they’re ready to go public and to lure firms already listed on other exchanges to change allegiances.

What Nasdaq’s Advertising Doesn’t Say

If one thing is noticeably missing from the TV campaign, it’s any mention of the world beyond the U.S. That could be because Nasdaq lost a bid for the London Stock Exchange earlier this year. If you’re looking for a more global message, you’ll find it instead in a new branding campaign launched on September 10 by Nasdaq’s competitor, N.Y.S.E. Euronext, which completed its merger in April—the same month that McKinney began work on its new Nasdaq campaign.

Like the Nasdaq ads, the N.Y.S.E. Euronext TV spot features prominent companies listed on its exchange, such as Hewlett-Packard, McDonald’s, and Disney. And the competing exchanges’ budgets are similar too.

Neither company would release its own figures, but according to data from TNS Media Intelligence, each company spent about $26 million on advertising in 2002. In 2003, spending dropped to about $11 million for each exchange, and then, beginning in 2004, their ad budgets began to veer apart. N.Y.S.E. spent $28 million in 2004 and $23 million in 2005, while Nasdaq spent $26 million in 2004 and $16 million in 2005. But the two found common ground again in 2006, when N.Y.S.E. spent $20 million and Nasdaq spent $21 million.

But when it comes to image, Nasdaq’s young, high-tech profile contrasts with the 215-year-old N.Y.S.E. While Nasdaq suggests innovation and youth, N.Y.S.E. has prestige. “It’s the premier long-standing market,” says Hans Stoll, director of the Financial Markets Research Center at Vanderbilt University. N.Y.S.E’s latest commercial, however, seems to encroach onto Nasdaq’s territory: The ad is composed entirely of computer graphics.

These recent marketing efforts could be the latest battle in the war for listings. According to Stoll, Nasdaq’s growth and increased capabilities spurred the two markets to start competing for new listings, thus making advertising an important weapon. Nasdaq has well-grounded hopes that image may be a factor when firms choose where to list. “It’s been very difficult for us to break out of, at times, the mantle of home for technology companies,” Nasdaq’s Jacobs says. “We’re so much more than that.”

E-Trade, which switched to Nasdaq from N.Y.S.E. at the end of 2006, says Nasdaq’s spirit of innovation influenced its move. “It wasn’t like we saw one ad and said, ‘You know I love that ad, and I want to partner with Nasdaq,’ ” says Nicholas Utton, E-Trade’s chief marketing officer. “But when you look at all the pieces, you say, ‘Wow, we naturally coexist.’ ”