OnMoney.com Kicks-Off $30 Million Campaign at Super Bowl

OnMoney.com Monday said it is kicking off a $30 million broadcast, print and radio advertising campaign with a commercial during Super Bowl XXXIV.

The Super Bowl spot, created by DDB Chicago, portrays a man working on his finances amid a sea of paper clutter. The paper mess grows and grows until it turns into a paper monster, which he conquers by consolidating his financial statements at OnMoney.com.

The commercial, which is scheduled to appear in the third quarter of the game, closes with the statement, "Get your money connected at OnMoney.com".

The three-month campaign will then continue with spots on prime time network programs including "The Late Show with David Letterman", "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?", "ER", and cable television networks including A&E and ESPN. The print campaign is will appear in business and lifestyle magazines such as Time, Business Week, Sports Illustrated, Golf Magazine, Food & Wine and Better Homes & Gardens. The radio campaign extends reach on ABC, Westwood One, and Media America networks.

The campaign is designed to introduce the new service to consumers. The site, with technology developed by VerticalOne, allows people to go to one place and look at all of their financial statements, and it provides investing information, as well.

OnMoney.com will compete with Intuit's Quicken accounts for the Web, which the company is launching. Yahoo also allows customers of some banks to view their accounts online.

Besides dealing with the competition, OnMoney.com has some work to do, internally. As it launches this $30 million campaign, its site (still labeled "beta") isn't working well enough to even allow users to register. It returns regular error messages, a problem which could be the kiss of death if it's the first thing new users encounter at the site and, if things aren't fixed, these errors are likely to intensify as traffic surges with the ad campaign.

OnMoney.com, although it operates independently, is primarily financed by Ameritrade Holding Corp., which owns the Ameritrade brokerage site.