30-Second Masterclass in Brand Awareness: Wealthsimple’s Blue Jays Ad and the Long Game of Marketing

Key illuminated insight

The best ads don’t sell. They signal. Wealthsimple’s Blue Jays spot didn’t ask for your money. It earned your memory, and in a market where trust compounds faster than interest, that’s worth every second of airtime.

Step into full illumination

If you caught the Blue Jays game recently, you probably saw it: Wealthsimple’s newest spot. A nostalgic nod to 1993, the year Toronto last won the World Series. The ad rewinds the tape, reminding viewers what the markets looked like then, and what’s happened since.

No celebrity endorsements. No over-produced CGI. Just music, motion, and meaning.

As a fractional Chief Marketing Officer, I have to hand it to them: this was a masterclass in brand efficiency.

The genius is in its restraint

You can almost feel the creative brief: “Make it simple. Make it smart. Make it stick.”

Production cost? Minimal. The heavy lifting comes from two things: licensing the music and applying a smart layer of motion graphics. No film crews. No sound stages. Yet it achieves what most multimillion-dollar brand campaigns miss: emotional resonance with perfect contextual timing.

While the Blue Jays fight for another shot at glory, Wealthsimple positions itself as the steady hand through decades of market highs, lows, and everything in between. It’s not about the Jays. It’s about longevity, perspective, and trust, the emotional trifecta of wealth management.

Why this works: memory, timing, and meaning

-> Memory: For Canadians, 1993 isn’t just a baseball year. It’s a cultural timestamp. Linking that to investing triggers nostalgia, which, psychologically speaking, deepens brand recall by up to 50%.

-> Timing: Running it during the World Series? Perfect. A captive audience, collective emotion, and prime national reach.

-> Meaning: The ad’s message, that smart investing outlasts market noise, aligns seamlessly with Wealthsimple’s core value proposition: simplicity, longevity, and confidence.

This is what I call brand gravity: a campaign that quietly pulls customers in without shouting over the crowd.

Brand awareness isn’t fluff, it’s fuel

Founders love to measure everything at the bottom of the funnel. Conversions. Click-throughs. CAC. But without top-of-funnel awareness, the rest of your funnel collapses like a bad soufflé.

Brand awareness ads, when done right, set the emotional and cognitive stage for performance to work. They build trust velocity. That means every future impression, email, or retargeted ad lands harder because the brand already feels familiar.

Wealthsimple doesn’t need you to sign up mid-inning. It just needs you to remember them when you finally decide to move your money.

The takeaway for founders and marketers

You don’t need a Super Bowl budget to make a memorable brand statement. You need:

-> A clear story worth repeating.

-> A cultural hook that feels timely, not trendy.

-> The discipline to keep it simple.

This ad shows what happens when a brand understands its market maturity. Wealthsimple isn’t fighting for clicks anymore, it’s cementing trust equity.

And that’s the long game every fintech should be playing.