'Tomorrow Begins Today' is Not Just an Ad Campaign

You can't stop life. And that's maybe the most beautiful thing about it.

You don't know what's going to happen to you today, tomorrow, in a decade, or a lifetime. You might fall in love. You might discover who you really are or what you really want to do. You might get miraculous news or receive a terrible diagnosis or go on vacation to a place where you realize you want to live for the rest of your days. That's the heartbreaking beauty of being a human being, and it's what we tried to capture in our new campaign. It's called Tomorrow Begins Today, and it's about life, death, love, loss, and money. It's about the great big everything of life, and the reasons we invest for our futures.

The idea is to find those moments when our lives change, and we want to be ready — and then to turn those moments into little films. Each commercial is composed of a single shot, so they feel more like snippets extracted from real lives. Here’s one of our favorites, Dream. It’s about being the first in your family to come to this country, because you want to make a future.

The work, which is produced by Wealthsimple's in-house creative team, is the first commercial campaign directed by Jonathan Alric, who, along with his cousin Guillaume, make-up the French electronic music duo The Blaze. Maybe you know them for their sui generis music, or the gorgeous, transporting and phenomenally original music videos like Territory, which won a Grand Prix prize at the Cannes film festival. We think it's pretty clear these won't be the last films ever directed by Jonathan Alric — we like to think our choosing Alric was our own smart investment in the future.

But yes, a thirty-year-old French electronic music phenom is a pretty unconventional choice for a bunch of TV commercials made by a financial company. Which is part of the point. Maybe, when you watch one of them for the first time, you'll say to yourself, ”Wait, is this even a commercial?” Well, we hope you'll say that. Because we don't think of them as commercials as much as we do very real micro moments that actual humans can relate to. And the point is that, yes, you may not be able to stop life. And we, none of us, should try. But we can be ready for it.

If you have a kid that's college-bound.

If your life is filled with love even as you leave it.

If you don't know what you want to do, but you know your job has left a black hole where your soul once resided.

If you're helping someone you love start over.

Or you're retiring, and leaving a whole way of life — but you know that you may yet have a whole lifetime ahead of you. (After all, about one out of every four 65 year olds today will live past age 90, and one out of 10 will live past age 95.)

As human beings, we tend to put a lot of faith in our ability to adapt. If something bad, or good, or just complicated happens to us in the future we assume we'll figure it out then. We’re survivors, right?The reality is, when one of those complicated, life-jumbling tremors happens, no one has ever said, “Good thing I don’t have a financial cushion! I need this to be extra hard for me to grow.”

There are a million little truths bundled into these spots. Like that talking about money, especially with mom and dad, is incredibly awkward; but that even if an inheritance is small, knowing what to do with it is crucial and investing it may ensure you’ll have something to leave your own kids. That people we love — our sons, daughters, even our parents — will have missteps in life and struggle to regain their footing. According to Brookings Institute, almost half of ex-prisoners have no reported earnings in the first several years after leaving prison.

But the one truth that underpins it all is that financial freedom is the ability to have choices. And we give up our ability to choose at great peril. Wealthsimple’s mission has always been to make world class financial services — and, we hope, real financial freedom —available to everyone. So that anyone who wants to can start building their tomorrow, today.

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The Editors

Wealthsimple's education team is made up of writers and financial experts dedicated to making the world of finance easy to understand and not-at-all boring to read.