How We Found Financial Advisors' Favorite Genre: Cooking
Financial advisors aren't easy to reach. They're busy, skeptical of anything that feels like marketing, and bombarded by every asset manager trying to earn a few minutes of their attention. So when Invesco QQQ came to us looking for a way to stand out with advisors and end investors, the brief wasn't "make an ad." It was "show up somewhere they actually want us to be."
QQQ has tracked 100 of the world's most innovative companies for 25 years. The question was how to say that somewhere other than the financial media every asset manager is already crowded into.
That's a question you can't answer from a boardroom. You need real data on what this audience cares about outside of work. That's where RYA came in.
We built the Invesco audience inside RYA using our proprietary behavioral data, ten years of passion-point data from real people, not inferred guesses from public surveys. Advisors and investors went in as one audience rather than two, which meant we were looking at what the whole room had in common. Once it was live, we could ask it direct questions: What do they do outside of work? What content are they already choosing to engage with? Where do they show up when no one's making them?
The answer that stood out was cooking, and specifically celebrity chefs and fine dining. Advisors and investors are 55% more likely than the general population to be passionate about them. They also over-indexed on AI and technology and on AR/VR. And they weren't watching passively, they were reading food magazines and actively creating content around food themselves.
The actions mattered as much as the genres. This audience goes to live events, reads magazines, and makes things. Read together, that's not a brief for print ads in trade publications. It's a brief for something you build and let people walk into.
That's a strange thing for a finance brand to hear. But it made sense. Cooking is where innovation, creativity, and craft show up in everyday life, the same qualities Invesco wanted to associate with QQQ.
Recipe for Innovation was born from that insight: a campaign that used real chefs and real recipes to make the case for innovation, without ever feeling like a product demo in disguise (even though, in a way, it was). The data hadn't just pointed at food. It pointed at chefs, so we built the whole thing around five of them.
The chefs made the argument better than a script could have. Jean-Georges on where ideas come from: every time he gets on a plane, he comes back with forty new ones. Innovation as restlessness, not as a product feature.
From there, the idea moved into the real world. We partnered with chefs like Marcus Samuelsson, Kristen Kish, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Claudette Zepeda, and Kwame Onwuachi, each bringing their own take on innovation in the kitchen. Each chef created five original dishes inspired by companies inside the ETF, which became more than 100 pieces of original content across pre-roll, CTV, social, and editorial partnerships with Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, Fast Company, and NYT Cooking, plus a 128-page print cookbook.
We built the Recipe for Innovation Kitchen, an interactive pop-up that traveled to major food festivals including the NYC Wine & Food Festival, SoBeWFF, Chicago Gourmet, and the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival. Attendees selected ingredients on an AR touchscreen and watched chefs turn them into dishes live, competing as sous-chef alongside the first-ever Chef Kwame Onwuachi hologram and an AI recipe generator.
Every dish, chef, and insight then lived on at TasteQQQ.com, a hub where food lovers and investors could explore and download recipes for free, with content topics and copy pulled from RYA. The campaign even ran an explainer on ETFs framed around a carton of eggs.
The results spoke for themselves: a 14% lift in unaided brand awareness, an 8.3% lift in consideration, a 245% increase in meetings booked, and a 21x ROI for hosted events.
None of it would have worked without starting from the right insight. Advisors and investors didn't need another finance ad. They needed a brand that understood what they were already paying attention to, and RYA is what let us find that out with data instead of a guess.
That's the part RYA does. It got us most of the way to the idea, faster than any amount of workshopping would have. The rest was taste and craft: which chefs, which dishes, how a hologram sous-chef should actually feel to stand in front of. Data found the door. People built what was behind it.
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