Chado-Design.com

It was reported earlier this month that Twentieth Century Fox is working on a movie based on the babies from the E*Trade commercials that have premiered during the Super Bowl over the past two years. The movie will most likely be terrible but studio heads still believe it could do surprisingly well at the box office. The plot supposedly involves the talking babies from the popular commercials trying to cross a playground. This isn’t the first time trade characters have made the leap from commercials to longer endeavors. A couple years ago they gave the Geico cavemen their own television show. As expected it didn’t last a full season but it demonstrated the ability for trade characters to have a screen presence for more than 90 seconds. While having your recognizable trade character star in a full length feature seems like a good way to increase brand exposure it also runs the highly probable risk of destroying the character. The E*Trade babies have been launched pretty successful commercials for the brand; people talk about them and they are often picked as favorites among the Super Bowl commercial premieres, effectively increasing the company’s brand equity. If/when this movie fails it will cast a negative shadow on the trade characters making them unpopular, irrelevant, and possibly unsuitable for further commercials. Also, the movie would be blatant rip off of the Look Who’s Talking movies, which were run into the ground in the early 90s with uninspired sequels. I believe that if E*Trade wanted to prolong the success of their “talking baby commercials” and keep their credibility intact, do not make this movie.