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TD has a new ad campaign, with this tagline:

We believe the digital future is also a human one.

Megan Matthews and I discuss it in the above 30-second video; our full conversation is here.

Working with many financial advisors as I do, my mind goes immediately to what TD’s wealth management function intends to get out of this campaign (even though the campaign is for the bank in its entirety).

Although I happen to have no insider knowledge as to what TD indeed thinks (and if I did, I would not tell you), I am comfortable in saying that the Big Banks’ wealth management arms see digital / AI platforms as opportunities in some cases, and as threats in others.

The banks believe (as do I) that high-net-worth clients are best served by human advisors; helping clients avoid emotional investing mistakes is just one big reason. Those clients, who are primarily comprised of entrepreneurs and business owners, need help from humans to manage not just their portfolios, but many aspects of their complex corporate and family structures.

And so we can begin to see the tightrope that the banks are walking with We believe the digital future is also a human one. Digital and AI-driven offerings are a fact and necessity of doing business in 2026, and the banks need to trumpet their effectiveness – but not in a way that drives HNW clients into the arms of robots.

The big question for advisors: for those HNW clients, are you performing better than a robot?

I have conducted one-on-one interviews with more than 500 of my clients’ HNW clients over the past 15 years. They often tell me of a previous advisor they left, and why. Here is what they almost never say: “I was unhappy with the returns.”

Here is what they almost always say: “He or she rarely called me or met with me, and overall didn’t seem to care.”

What was lacking was not what AIs can do, which is pick stocks. What was lacking was what only a human can do, which is extend a personal touch and truly care.

If you don’t have those processes embedded in your brand, you are winging it. The remedy is to take your brand and operationalize it. I have a new program by which you can quickly and easily do that. You can read about it here.

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It must have almost killed Sidney Crosby, to not play in the Olympic hockey gold medal game vs. the United States, due to injury.

That is what I would say if I didn’t know anything about the man. Or observed his downcast placidity in the post-loss news conference, in which he and coach Jon Cooper were the only two members of the Canadian team to appear.

A reporter asked him how he came to his decision not to play.

Sid’s answer: “I’m not going to compromise our team.”

Sid also spoke in that news conference about how much the team had wanted the gold medal for Connor McDavid, a statement that in its humility was truly an astonishing inversion of reality, or at least the reality that was painted in the media before and during the Olympic tournament. It was not McDavid, but Crosby – being the captain of the team, its most senior and worshipped member, and almost certainly playing in his last Olympics – who was understood by the public to be the player for whom everyone on the Canadian team wanted to win.

Yes, Crosby scored the Golden Goal for Canada at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Yes, he has won three Stanley Cups, and scored more than one point per game for all 20 seasons he has played in the NHL, a feat surpassing every player in history including Wayne Gretzky.

But his brand is more than that. It is the humility with which he plays – which allows Canadians in particular to project their national self-image on to him, and people more generally to project their personal self-image – that makes his brand the powerhouse it is.

People love humility in a personal brand.

That is what I would say if the world was not so full of bombast and egotists with massive and massively profitable followings.

There is indeed a continuum upon which you can pick your spot. Bombast tends to polarize, making your followers and haters enthusiastic in approximately equal measure. Humility is the safer path, less likely to inflame emotions in either direction.

Which brings me back to my opening shortlist of Crosby’s achievements: there is no avoiding that they are, in fact, the essential element to his brand. Excellence conquers all. The humility-ego axis is more tonal.

What are you shooting for?

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See the full personal brand conversation that I had with Megan Matthews; we talked about Sidney Crosby, and also about new Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel.

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Image of Sidney Crosby by Michael Miller – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

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Imagine working for a $3-billion company for 30 years, and being the CEO for two, and not knowing the ingredients of your product.

That was precisely the position of Steve Brass, until 2024, when he was finally shown the secret formula for WD-40.

It is written in a notebook that is locked in a safety deposit box in San Diego. Brass described the reveal as “like getting into Fort Knox.”

WD-40 has made protection of the formula a fundamental brand attribute, declining to patent it (which would have required public disclosure) and rationing knowledge to an estimated two to four WD-40 employees at any one time.

Why did I find myself grinning in this video conversation about the story? The short is above; the full conversation is here.

Because there is something charming about it. We all like the idea of a secret (if it’s a secret, it must be great), and the tension of not knowing something, which counterintuitively in some cases makes us trust and enjoy the product even more. Think about Coca-Cola’s secret recipe, or the mysterious 11 herbs and spices of KFC, or the Caramilk Secret. We don’t know. And we don’t want to know, because that would ruin everything.

I was also grinning because I enjoy the fact that WD-40 has taken an almost unimaginably mundane product – a canned liquid that does a bunch of mundane things like stop squeaks and loosen bolts – and somehow given it an emotional, human, quality.

And that is a monumental achievement, one which underlines the fact that we can always find a way to differentiate a product, service, organization or person, if we are deliberate about the positioning process.

PS Here is a great story about the secrecy around the formula. Fun fact: “WD” stands for “Water Displacement,” and “40” refers to the 40th attempt at creating the product, the one that finally worked.

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FIFA is one of the brands I am watching closely this year amid the impending World Cup. They seem to love controversy, to the point that I wonder if they create it intentionally.

Above is a video in which Megan Matthews and I discuss the top three brands we are watching this year; mine are FIFA/World Cup, the Olympics, and Canada. Megan’s are Gap, Rebel and the Toronto Tempo.

There are already multiple uproars in progress about the tournament, and it does not even start for another six weeks.

Mostly the brouhahas have to do with ticketing. FIFA has been opaque and opportunistic (some might say exploitative and disingenuous), by:

• making the ticket-buying process lengthy and complicated
• charging ticket prices so high that they surprised even people who are price-insensitive
• using a dynamic pricing model that prevents people from understanding how what they bought compares to what is available
• obscuring the exact seats people have purchased, in a way that led people to believe they had purchased the best possible seats, only for FIFA to later release seats that are even better

There are other controversies too numerous to list here, including arguments with host cities about who should pay, and how much, for public transportation to and from games, and the cost of fan festivals (promised by Toronto to be free, and then $10, and then free again).

This is all amid the breathtaking cost to hosts. The total cost for the six Toronto games is $380-million (including stadium upgrades), that bill to be paid jointly by the feds, province and city – in other words, by the taxpayer. The taxpayer is likewise on the hook for the estimated total cost of the eight games in Vancouver, being in a range between $532- and $624-million.

And amid data in the marketplace that FIFA’s promised flood of $3.8-billion in “positive economic output” to Canada, and $40-billion USD in GDP to the United States, is not materializing.

Why is soccer the biggest, most widely-played sport in the world? Because it is cheap to play. All you need is a ball.  This is why FIFA’s exploitative ticket practices are so offensive to what is supposedly the world’s most inclusive sport.

Will it hurt the World Cup brand? Quite possibly. There has been a clear decline in the number of bidders, for example:

• For the five World Cups between 1994 and 2010, there were an average of 3.6 bidders.
• For the five World Cups between 2014 and 2030, there were an average of 2.2 bidders.

A parallel case can be found in what I would argue is an even stronger global brand, the Summer Olympics:

• For the five Summer Games between 1996 and 2012, there were an average of 7 bidders.
• For the five Summer Games between 2016 and 2032, there were an average of 3.4 bidders.

This trend is also clear in bidding for the Winter Games:

• For the five Winter Games between 1998 and 2014, there were an average of 6 bidders.
• For the five Winter Games between 2018 and 2034, there were an average of 1.8 bidders.

In this story about Sidney Crosby, I said something about the power of brand humility. FIFA, if they were really thinking about the long-term survival and success of their brand, could take a page from the Canadian captain.

Check out the video, above, in which Megan Matthews and I discuss the top three brands we are watching this year. I start talking about FIFA and the World Cup at the 8:25 mark.

By Faith Seekings

Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays. Season’s Greetings. Happy Hanukkah. Thank you.
How about none of the above?

We have written elsewhere in this blog, here and here, about Christmas and Hanukkah and still believe strongly that they are great ways to express caring and thanks.

But guess what? You can keep your powder dry for other times of year – and thereby really stand out.

Two Reasons to Skip a Greeting/Thank You this Winter

1. It may get lost in the noise anyway. Your message may get missed because so many people are doing the same thing at the same time. December is definitely the busiest month for email cards, corporate gifts, client appreciation parties and social media posts sharing company well-wishes. Unless you go really big, creative and fantastic, it could very well be lost in the noise. When I worked as a designer, many of my clients would wait until the last minute to request something. They saw others’ start coming in – panicked, and sent something into the fray with little thought behind it. You don’t have to do it. You know when I need a fun or warm message? February.
2. If this is your main outreach, there may be a problem. You should keep in mind that engagement could suffer if this is one of the few, or the only, client outreach campaigns you do. It’s more important to create and share meaningful content regularly. Client feedback has told us time and time again that regular communication builds brands through relationships and trust, all of which generates referrals. Choose the media (blog posts, email campaigns, social media, podcasts), set a schedule with time for content creation blocked out, and stick to it – if you want to create meaningful engagement. Consider putting this year’s last-minute effort towards something more intentional, and include a holiday greeting in the plan for 2026 – or, as you will see in the next section, not.

Want to do Something Different?

• Send a New Year’s Greeting in early January.
• Do a thank you campaign to clients, suppliers or referral sources around Thanksgiving.
• Celebrate the summer solstice with tidbits about science and traditions.
• Send a series of funny memes in February. Please.

All of these occasions are BEGGING to be owned! You can scoop them up and make them a pillar of your brand identity. You can even find a special day that aligns with an element of your brand foundation and send out a brand-inspired message then.

The winter holiday greeting shouldn’t be your primary client outreach, especially at a time when everyone is doing the same thing. If it feels rushed and inauthentic, it’s not that effective. If this is all you do, I challenge you to set an intention for the new year to communicate with clients and your community regularly. They want to hear from you because they chose you. They chose you because you are brilliant. And we can help.