To: CanynGirl who wrote (1120 ) 5/19/1999 9:46:00 AM From: Winston Kim Respond to of 10027
Article in the WSJ about KNIGHT Advertising Nasdaq Dealer Plans a Campaign To Quit Shadows of Wall Street By GREG IP Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL The explosion in online stock trading is probably the biggest story on Wall Street this year. But one firm that has been a big player in the boom has remained behind the scenes, nearly unknown. Knight/Trimark Group is out to change all that. The Jersey City, N.J., securities dealer has hired Omnicom Group's Doremus, a specialist in financial advertising, to handle its first national advertising campaign, expected to cost $10 million to $20 million. Most people who trade stocks online have never heard of Knight/Trimark, whose own stock has soared to $71.7188 from a yearly low of $2.25. But it is largely their orders that have propelled Knight/Trimark in just four years to become the largest dealer on the Nasdaq Stock Market, claiming 15% of that market's volume, and one of the largest dealers in New York Stock Exchange stocks. And this presents an image challenge. Typically when an online investor clicks in an order, an online broker doesn't carry out that order itself but sends it along to a stock exchange or "market maker." The largest Nasdaq market maker currently happens to be Knight/Trimark, in part because it counts among its owners some of the major online brokers, including E*Trade, Ameritrade Holding and Waterhouse Investor Services, a unit of TorontoDominion Bank. (Knight got 41% of its business from owner/customers in 1998.) But Knight may have to fight harder for that business in the future. The firm competes with private electronic communications networks, known as ECNs, for orders, and two of its owner/customers have recently invested in such ECNs and will offer them as an alternative to market makers for their customers. Lou Rubin, executive vice president at Doremus, says the ad campaign aims to raise online customers' awareness of Knight, and this, it is hoped, will feed back to the brokerage firms that decide where to send orders. He said the agency is toying with the slogan, "Where the trade gets done." Knight/Trimark (no relation to KnightRidder) has advertised in the trade press in the past. But the current campaign will aim at consumer-oriented outlets such as cable television and newspapers. Mr. Rubin says Knight was particularly impressed by a campaign Doremus designed for ITT Industries' pump-manufacturing division with various fish singing Handel's Hallelujah chorus. "It touched people emotionally," he says, including Knight's president and chief executive officer, Kenneth Pasternak. Doremus also has designed campaigns for Goldman Sachs Group highlighting its underwriting of technology stocks, and for Credit Suisse First Boston. For Knight, the campaign also responds to what it considers unwarranted criticism. In recent months, regulators have warned online brokers to be sure they aren't sending orders to particular market makers because of financial incentives, as opposed to the quality of order handling they provide. Competing ECNs also have tried to play up the difference in how they do trades, for commissions only, in contrast to market makers that trade with their proprietary capital, seeking to profit from the prices at which they buy and sell. ECN competitors "bring up a lot of innuendo that because we're proprietary we're somehow compromising" customers, says Mr. Pasternak. "We think there's a lot of misinformation being propagated. We're trying to get a story out" about the company's value to customers. He noted that Knight/Trimark was planning an ad campaign well before Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt and others expressed concern about the quality of trades customers get. BRIEFS: Interpublic Group's Mullen in Wenham, Mass., landed the $12 million-to-$15 million ad account for Northern Light Technology, a Cambridge, Mass., developer of an Internet search engine used by professionals and business. The agency beat out Ingalls in Boston and Jordan McGrath, a unit of Havas Advertising's Euro RSCG Worldwide, in a review managed by Pile & Co... . Mobil picked Omnicom Group's DDB Worldwide to handle ad duties for its Mobil 1 motor oil. The agency is breaking a new campaign for Mobil 1's TriSynthetic oil. Grace & Rothschild previously handled the account.