Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision, and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's 12 exchanges and six clearing houses around the world. And now, welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
A few weeks ago, the New York Stock Exchange welcomed a new neighbor to Broad Street directly across from our facade. The city rolled out the red carpet with a couple of hundred VIPs braving the Arctic temperatures to unveil her. The Fearless Girl, the brainchild of State Street Global Advisors was welcomed with speeches from Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, New York City commissioner, Carmelyn Malalis, State Street Global Advisors CEO, Cyrus Taraporevala, and the New York Stock Exchange's executive vice chairman, Betty Liu. Betty summed up the moment best when she said this.
Betty Liu:
This intersection in particular has been marked with the people and events that have changed the world. And today, this intersection has a new chapter. So if this chapter had an illustration, it's been brought to life in bronze with this statue here of Fearless Girl. Now, we're honored to welcome Fearless Girl permanently here to the very spot that has captured the minds of business leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Five days a week, twice a day, we ring the opening and closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange from our podium with groups representing the hardest working, highest striving people pursuing their dreams. And from now on, they'll also look at Fearless Girl and think about how far we've come, but they'll also think about how far we still have to go in that ongoing pursuit where diversity inclusion also means representation at the various highest levels of corporate and government leadership. So welcome to the neighborhood Fearless Girl. You're among friends here at the New York Stock Exchange. We're proud that you stand with us as an enduring symbol calling for change and inspiring the fearless who will follow. Thank you.
Josh King:
Fearless Girl first appeared on Broadway on the eve of International Women's Day 2017 as a temporary art installation, but quickly became a permanent symbol of an entire movement. The placement of the statue commissioned by State Street Global Advisors and created by sculptor, Kristen Visbal to promote State Street's SHE index fund was accompanied by a call on companies to increase the number of women on their corporate boards. Since then, 301 companies that had previously had no women on their board have added at least one female director. Following the festivities outside, State Street's chief marketing officer and one of the originators of Fearless Girl, Stephen Tisdalle sat down for a fireside chat with the New York Stock Exchange's Betty Liu to talk about all things fearless. Their conversation on the origins of Fearless Girl gorilla and disruptive marketing in the financial space and getting investing advice from Elizabeth Banks right after this.
Elizabeth Banks:
Our mission is to bring the world together through live experiences. We're focused on building a technology enablement platform for event creators, lower the friction and cost of creating an event and increase the rate of success for event creators all over the world. We're are a global inclusive company in 11 different countries. This really marks a new chapter for Eventbrite and it feels like the starting line. Eventbrite, now listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Josh King:
Our guest today, Stephen Tisdalle is State Street Global Advisors chief marketing officer and senior managing director. Stephen oversees the company's brand and advertising, channel marketing, digital strategy and creative services. In his two years with the firm, State Street has launched several innovative and successful campaigns from the Fearless Girl to Crazy Enough to Work, a podcast hosted by Elizabeth Banks. Prior to joining State Street Global Advisors, Stephen was a senior vice president and head of marketing for OppenheimerFunds. And before that, was a managing director at Ogilvy & Mather overseeing the firm's accounts, including BlackRock, Barclays, British Airways, Cisco, IBM, and UPS. Now, let's join the conversation with Stephen Tisdalle interviewed by our own Betty Liu.
Betty Liu:
So thank you so much, Stephen, for joining us here on this really historic day at the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you guys for taking a break out of your busy workdays to sit here with us. It's really great, Stephen, to have you here so that we can really learn a little bit more about Fearless Girl, hear about the origins and also what changes today right after she's arrived here at the NYSE. And tell me first about Fearless Girl. Has it exceeded your expectations?
Stephen Tisdalle:
I would say just slightly. Yeah. Extraordinarily, it's exceeded our expectations. We never thought in our wildest dreams that creating a statue of an eight-year-old girl would become not a global phenomenon, but become part of our culture, our modern-day culture. And it's exciting to be very honoring to be part of a campaign that has become something way beyond our brand. And it was only meant to be a one-week installation.
Betty Liu:
Right. And here we are over a year later. What do you think is going to change for her now that she's here in front of the New York Stock Exchange?
Stephen Tisdalle:
Well, she's on a bigger stage. You don't get much bigger than the New York Stock Exchange when it comes to being a public place that people hold very sacred in this country and quite frankly, being the epicenter, still, the world's financial epicenter, having her located right across the street as a symbol of inspiring more women leadership in publicly traded companies. And I think this stage actually brings more heft if you will, to her message, not just here in the United States, but globally.
Betty Liu:
Give us some pointers on how we should talk about Fearless Girl.
Stephen Tisdalle:
I think it's a great question. There's a reason why we created Fearless Girl and why she exists. And as many of the remarks that were said just a couple of hours ago at the unveiling, she does mean different things to different people and that's okay, but I think we want to understand. So why was she created, to begin with? And it really goes back to a few years ago, our company, State Street Global Advisors, which is the asset management arm of State Street were the third largest asset manager in the world with 2.8 trillion in assets had a program as do most of our competitors, by the way, called asset stewardship where there's a fiduciary responsibility of asset managers to protect the long-term interests of investors. And part of that program is looking at the sustainability of companies' performance and the ingredients that feed into that. And companies who have more of an equilibrium in terms of the leadership at the top between men and women outperform companies that don't.
Stephen Tisdalle:
And if I came to you and said, "Hey, I have a business that actually can give you a 36% greater return on ROE. Would you be interested to talk about it?" And you would say absolutely. And fact is, well, companies that have a greater percentage of women on their leadership and in their boards have a 36% higher ROE than those companies that don't. And so that was a fact that we had. It wasn't exclusive to our brand. The program had been in place for a number of years. We as one of the big index strategists, if we don't like the way a company performs, we can't just walk away and sell it. So you can't have the S&P 499. And so the question is, how do we exercise that power to influence those companies in the index? And one of the ways is through our proxy voting power on behalf of investors and actually influencing the composition of their boards. And so that program existed for a number of years.
Stephen Tisdalle:
And when I came into this role, I was trying to find things that we could do very inexpensively. The total budget was less than $250,000. I thought, let's take this program, let's try and find a way of communicating these facts without a lot of written messages. And one of the challenges facing our brand we'll get into is that we have been a very quiet player in the category. We're the third largest asset manager that no one hardly knows anything about. And so my brief to our agency and to my own department was how do we find interesting ways? So the message, the way you want to commute indicate Fearless Girl is that she was created to really represent the fact that companies that have greater gender diversity outperform those that don't, and that over a quarter of the Russell 3000 companies, the target companies that we were looking at did not have a single woman on their board.
Stephen Tisdalle:
And therefore, this posed a very big challenge. And we created the statue to communicate that simple message and do it in a way that wasn't a protest. She's not shaking her fist or wasn't shaking her fist at the bowl. She in many respects is a parallel to what the Charging Bull was. When that bull was installed back in 1987 across the street, it was really to represent the spirit of American capitalism and Fearless Girl represents that same spirit of American capitalism in terms of what the future holds, and that is having greater performance by having greater gender diversity on their leadership. And it's as simple as that. That's what she stands for. It's very much about value, long-term value, long-term value creation for investors. The values bit is what makes it emotionally appealing and relevant.
Betty Liu:
And that's okay with you that people have taken her message beyond more diversity in the boardroom, more diversity in corporate America and they've taken that and associated it with Me Too or associated it with all sorts of other movements. That's okay with you?
Stephen Tisdalle:
It wasn't why she was created, but I'm okay if people want to take and have a meaningful understanding about gender diversity and what it means to them. I don't want us to lose, especially the partnership that we have with you and your organization. What are we trying to communicate? What is the real purpose of that statue and why did we elect to put her here on a bigger stage? And it's as simple as we want to inspire all publicly traded companies to embrace these facts and to start to change the composition of their leaders and bring up a generation of leaders that don't yet exist.
Betty Liu:
I'm just curious, Stephen, in this last year and a little over a year's time and we've seen a lot of changes. In your video you mentioned over 300 companies and put a woman on their boards, for instance. What to you is going to spell success? What's success?
Stephen Tisdalle:
When I think we start to see, not just have a woman on a board, but start to see that you have a balance of men and women on publicly traded companies.
Betty Liu:
Okay.
Stephen Tisdalle:
That, absolutely is our penultimate objective here. I think another aspect to it is that's a more tangential message is around board governance. And that's a clear message that we have in our asset stewardship program. And she has become a symbol for us around our version of board governance and what we stand for as an asset manager. But first and foremost, it's really about seeing parody.
Betty Liu:
Before we turn to the work that you're doing at State Street Global Advisors, what did you learn? Were there any mistakes that you made? What did you learn from this?
Stephen Tisdalle:
Well, the planning, for example, to install Fearless Girl across the street took way more time and energy than the initial installation. The initial installation was treated almost like a television commercial. You get a one-week permit, they block off the street, you're allowed to erect whatever as long as it's all taken down and it's not a public safety hazard. And that's one of the reasons why Fearless Girl had to be moved is she was becoming and did become a public safety hazard. So the lessons learned were we had thought through that this would be a short-term campaign. We didn't really plan for it to become the phenomenon, and we weren't, as a result, ready as a brand to really handle just the inbound volume of literally thousands of calls from all over the world.
Stephen Tisdalle:
Within 38 hours of her being installed in Bowling Green, we had a billion and a half social media impressions that then since surpassed 8 billion social media engagements, which is just unheard of on a campaign that had no paid media behind it at all. It was just really the general public and quite frankly, industry creating an emotional connection. We hadn't anticipated that. We also had where we did spend a lot of time, which we were ready for is why State Street, why State Street Global Advisors, who in the world are you, and what moral authority do you have to create a statue like this when you look at your own diversity numbers, which aren't bad, but they're not necessarily category leading, and what do you have to say about that?
Stephen Tisdalle:
So a lot of time was spent on that. And I'll get into that maybe with some of the other questions. But one of the things that I learned was when you create something like this and you start to see that it becomes a cultural icon, how can you actually start to weave that into the broader messaging of what the brand stands for? There are other things that you can start to leverage because we have a lot of interesting values and beliefs as does your organization here. And how do you connect those so you're not seen as a one-trick pony on one topic? And that's still a challenge, to be frank, for us.
Betty Liu:
Yeah. Because it has...
Stephen Tisdalle:
It dwarfs everything else that we say.
Betty Liu:
Right. Exactly. It's almost anything that anyone would probably want to talk about. So it comes up I'm sure in every conversation.
Stephen Tisdalle:
Yes.
Betty Liu:
Well, I want to talk about some of your other campaigns though, because Fearless Girl is one of several campaigns you've launched in your time there, and you joined in 2016.
Stephen Tisdalle:
That's right.
Betty Liu:
So there's Bring Home the Dow, Goldilocks without the O, of course, geology.
Stephen Tisdalle:
Yeah. Crazy Enough to Work.
Betty Liu:
And there's also Crazy Enough to Work with Elizabeth Banks. So what is your strategy behind it?
Stephen Tisdalle:
So here's the challenge we face as a brand. When you're the third largest, and this was very revealing to our leadership. When I came in, I started looking at, well, what is our top of mind awareness because there's nobody in the category that hasn't heard that works within asset management that doesn't know who State Street Global Advisors is. We don't have an awareness problem, what we have is a top mind share issue and we also have a lack of understanding. When people are asked what they know about us as a brand, they really could say one, maybe two things about us. The first thing is we're the big global indexer, the index giant. And that we are, but we also are pioneers. We created the world's first exchange traded fund. Many people don't know that. We have SPY. People know SPY. Who doesn't know SPY? It's the largest ETF in the world, but they don't associate it with our brand, which was quite alarming to our leadership. And this all came down to we have a 7% top of mind awareness.
Betty Liu:
But was it different from, by the way? Just explain top of mind for this again.
Stephen Tisdalle:
Yeah. I'll explain that. When surveying investors, either in public pension, big public pension plans, or financial advisors in the intermediary space on a global basis, there are two questions asked. The first question is, who do you intend to engage or talk about your investments within the next 12 months? And it's open-ended, but they're shown a list of brands, our competitors. When they answer that question, they're given one more try. In addition to the name that you've cited, who else do you intend to talk to? When you took both of those together and added our brand, only 7% said that we would be on their consideration list for a discussion in the next 12 months. That is a pretty scary figure when you're the third largest.
Stephen Tisdalle:
And our competitors, our top two competitors were around 44% and 36% top of mind. We have then a whole slew of other competitors that are 1/10th of our size that would be in the 20s. We weren't even in the teens. I'm about to show you some examples to communicate something broader than just the products that we were promoting, and my marketing budget is quite constrained in that we are only set up really to promote products. The funding of our marketing is associated inextricably linked to products. That's how the marketing budgets are created by and large. So I have very little to work with at the brand level. And so how do I kill two birds if you will, with one stone, and that is, do I promote the product and really bring out the salient features or do I also at the same time try to promote the brand? And what we are trying to do is to have people go, "Hmm, I didn't realize that was from State Street Global Advisors. I'm going to have another look at them." And we're creating a sense of intrigue.
Stephen Tisdalle:
And to do that, you have to step out of the category. You either fit in or you lead. And with the support of my leadership, I've been given the license to lead. What I'm showing here is pretty tame compared to some of the stuff I've shown them. And they're like, ah, I don't know if we want to lead that much. We have MDY, which is one of the largest mid-cap ETFs. Almost all of our target audience knows MDY. We don't need to promote the product. What they don't know is, of course, about the brand. And in this case, I tried to and it worked incredibly well create an asset that financial advisors could use with the end investor about, hey, we've just taken a big position in the mid-cap space.
Stephen Tisdalle:
You probably don't realize what the mid-cap space is. You interact with these brands every day like Dunkin' Donuts or JetBlue, or you buy the New York Times every day. These are all in the mid-cap. And so how do we take that whole category and bring it to life and talk about what makes these companies mid-cap companies because they actually outperform the large-cap space over a 10-year period. A lot of people don't know that. And what is that secret sauce? Is there something in JetBlue or in the New York Times, or in Sam Adams that there's a pattern? And we thought let's do this in an entertaining medium that's targeting the end investor. And our objective, we don't market to the end investor, we all only sell to the intermediary.
Stephen Tisdalle:
We're a pure BMB outfit and so we engaged Elizabeth Banks and she got very involved and we thought, let's find a way of interviewing these companies and bringing out that secret sauce so that people could learn about them on their way home or on their way into work through podcasts and video. I did not go for a big mass impression campaign, it's very targeted and I'm really only interested in full completions, meaning someone will watch the entire podcast or listen, I should say the entire podcast or watch the entire video. So let's take a look. I've got a sizzle reel of what it's about.
Elizabeth Banks:
There are some companies that can't or won't change, and we know how their story ends. But there are a special group of companies that can. And when their world gets turned upside down, they pull off a crazy move or two to stay upright. I'm Elizabeth Banks, and I've teamed up with State Street Global Advisors to uncover the bold moves mid-cap companies make to thrive and survive. I don't think we've ever seen more competition in the coffee space. We definitely needed to do something to stay relevant. And if we didn't do it now, it might be too late. If we're going to get done to done, let do it in this car. There's so much free news. How do you combat free news? You read the New York Times?
Stephen Tisdalle:
I do.
Elizabeth Banks:
I might not hack it if you get around the Paywall. Are you interested in that?
Stephen Tisdalle:
Yeah.
Elizabeth Banks:
Good. That's the right answer.
Stephen Tisdalle:
Samuel Adams, the first revolutionary, the rabble-rouser. What he did was create a political revolution. I wanted to create a beer revolution. We zig where others are zag, and now people are tapping into what we saw 20 years ago.
Elizabeth Banks:
These are just some of the companies that make up MDY, the mighty mid-cap fund and their stories are crazy enough to work.
Betty Liu:
You've just seen this. I want to make sure I get a least some audience questions as well. Does anybody have any questions for Stephen?
Speaker 6:
The success of Fearless Girl when it came out, it felt so organic. Do you think looking back on it you would've changed anything or the organicness of it helped fuel the phenomena?
Stephen Tisdalle:
There was something very authentic where we didn't overly virtualize it. We didn't create a whole bunch of trinkets. Obviously, there's t-shirts and so forth out there and we're fairly strict about the license agreement we have also with the artist, Kristen Visbal. It was organic. We didn't put paid media behind it, we just let it happen. That I think is what was really unusual and that's why Fearless Girl won 18 can lions last year, why she just took the industry by storm.
Betty Liu:
And just that Stephen, maybe to wrap up, these campaigns, they're fun. They're out of the box. And seeing Elizabeth Banks doing all sorts of wacky things with these CEOs, how do you measure the six campaigns?
Stephen Tisdalle:
All of these campaigns, including Fearless Girl, which is not advertising a product. But because blank happens, I don't know how many asset managers do ads because shit happens, but it does as we've seen in the markets. The whole thrust is to create a platform for our sales organization and our investors to enter into a dialogue. And what I'm interested in is the number of conversations that we're having, the number of engagements we're having on the topics that we have a strong opinion about and we also ultimately have product behind. So the whole thrust is not mass impressions, it's not creativity for creativity's sake, it's to get people to go, "Hmm, I'm interested. I want to go deeper. I want to either then get deeper into the facts, I'll take a call from a State Street Global Advisor's account executive. I'd like to carry on the conversation."
Stephen Tisdalle:
That's what I measure. I'm not measuring mass impressions, click-through rates, yes. But I'm really looking at completions and I'm looking at does the level of engagement that we're getting on the marketing and correspond with what's in salesforce with the actual conversations we're having.
Betty Liu:
Terrific guidance there. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us here on a terrifically busy day.
Stephen Tisdalle:
Thank you. This has been great. Thank you. Excellent.
Betty Liu:
I'm sure. Thank you so much.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Stephen Tisdalle, State Street Global Advisors chief marketing officer and senior managing director. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at NYSE. Our show is produced by Pete Ash and Ian Wolfe with production assistance from Ken Abel and Stephen Schwarzman. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the Library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor is affiliates make any representations or warranties. Express are implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor approve or endorse any of the content herein all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing here in constitution offered to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of mental clarity.
