MarketWatch Ad Campaign 'Lays' Out New Features

Dow Jones & Company's MarketWatch has begun a multi-channel ad campaign, which features a golden egg-laying goose, meant to draw attention to new site features. For the effort, MarketWatch has dropped its standard motto, "The Story Behind The Numbers," for the goose--which is meant to convey to investors how MarketWatch makes investing gainfully as easy as laying an egg.

"The new ads play up the site's brand character, which is young, enjoyable, trusted, smart, and casual," Nathan Richardson, senior vice president and general manager of Dow Jones Online, said.

The rich media ads--created by the ad agency Trahan, Burden & Charles, and running until year's end--will appear on Yahoo! and Google, as well as financial sites such as TheStreet.com, Motley Fool, Morningstar, Bloomberg, and Reuters. Print ads with the same creative will appear in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, and USA Today.

The next phase of the campaign will feature a visual of a hand plucking dollars from a money tree, according to Jennifer Stranzl, Dow's vice president of marketing and consumer electronic publishing.

"MW Live Quotes," which automatically updates stock-quote information with the context of stories, is one of MarketWatch's new features. Now, when a visitor to the site reads a story, they will see a current quote for the symbols mentioned in stories--regardless of when a story was first published.

The technology and editorial departments worked closely together to avoid contextual issues that the feature might bring about, Richardson said. For instance, if a user reads a story today about a presently weak stock, which was written at a time when that stock was flying high, the editorial team would note the change parenthetically.

Other new features include blogging, RSS, and a rollover function, which gives users stock information in a content bubble when they rollover the names of companies. MarketWatch developed each of these new features in house using AJAX technology.

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