Our take is that how the broker wants you to think about them tells you something about them. It says something about what they think their target customers are all about. It gives you clues as to whether you are a good fit with a particular firm, and whether you would want to do business with them. A Rohrschach blot test of a sort if you will. And hey, we think it's a fun and interesting way to think about the problem.
Advertising is made up of information and emotional appeal in varying proportions.
Since the stock market runs on two emotions, fear and greed, we have created and applied the Netsurfer Focus Fear-Greed Scale in the process. We reviewed the ads of the major online players and ranked them based on their message and how well that message came across based on the above. Other ranking criteria include message clarity and production quality. Memorability is factored in since our methodology is base on our recall of the ads, and opinions most certainly abound. The results are summarized in the associated table .