Charles Schwab

Charles Schwab
Own Your Tomorrow

A financial services pioneer rediscovers its challenger mojo.

Keith at Mr. A's in San Diego. Photo: Whitty

Charles Schwab built its name by standing with individual investors against Wall Street’s institutional interests. But after three decades of growth, research revealed that the original discount-brokerage challenger had come to be viewed as just another mainstream financial-services giant.

This is the story of how, with a little chutzpah, I secured a role in an Effie Award winning financial-services campaign — and, in the process, was given the opportunity to help tell a personal family story of extraordinary consequence.

In partnership with the original challenger-brand consultancy, Eat Big Fish, Schwab identified a large, overlooked audience: self-reliant optimists who felt shut out by an investment industry built around institutional interests.

Own Your Tomorrow shifted the brand away from product claims and toward a more resonant idea of ownership — the confidence to shape your own future.

Schwab extended the platform through a partnership with Vimeo Brand Studio, commissioning independent filmmakers to create brand-funded short films that broke with financial-services convention. The brief was not to manufacture testimonials, but to find human stories capable of provoking an intense emotional response.

"Investing is an act of optimism and Schwab was built for the optimists who believe tomorrow will be better than today."

Charles Schwab

I had known Schwab SVP of Brand Pete Boland socially and kept pressing for the opportunity to show him what that could look like. After working through a raft of concepts, my partner, Lori, suggested an extraordinary story closer to home: that of her father, U.S. Naval Aviator Lieutenant Commander Keith Roudebush.

I saw immediately that Keith’s life — defined by courage, quiet self-reliance, and optimism — could give Own Your Tomorrow an authentic human expression.

Pete bought the idea over lunch and I provided creative direction and executive produced the film, including securing access to the USS Midway, the carrier from which Keith flew combat missions during the Vietnam War. Ben Proudfoot, then an emerging Vimeo-connected filmmaker and now an Academy Award-winning director, directed the film.

The following results reflect the performance of the Own Your Tomorrow campaign as a whole.

Performance: Total client assets grew 36% during the five-year campaign window, reaching $7.98 trillion as of October 2021 — as the narrative solidified Schwab’s market dominance.
Fame: Keith’s film emerged as the most successful in the campaign, racking up over 1 million organic views on Facebook shortly after release.
Market Value: Within three years, Landor’s Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) showed Schwab leapfrogging every major brokerage to become the category leader in differentiation and relevance — the two dimensions BAV identifies as leading indicators of future brand value — vaulting from a lagging position straight into the market-leading quadrant.