The role seems simple enough: deliver a line for an ad and convincingly play a professional trader. The candidates, however, have very different ideas about what that professional should look like. One performance becomes overly dramatic, another resembles an influencer’s hype-building routine, and a third relies on technical jargon. The director at the table grows increasingly tired, while the search for the right face for the ad keeps falling short.
FxPro turned this audition into its new global campaign, A Real Pro Trader, unveiled in early October. The broker plays with the image of its own category, particularly the habit of portraying professionalism in trading through serious facial expressions, screens and a confident manner. In the ad, these familiar roles are exaggerated to comic effect, with each new candidate making the director’s job even harder.
Among those taking part in the audition are Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, drivers for the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team. Their guest appearance continues the partnership FxPro has had with McLaren Racing since 2018, this time through a comic scenario in which the drivers also join the search for a “real professional.”
The decision to shoot the campaign with actors on a physical set was an important part of the creative approach. Instead of AI-generated content or stock footage, the team chose a format closer to a comedy sketch, where the humour comes from the performances and exaggeration
“We could have taken the easy route: AI actors, stock footage and the same serious-trader-staring-at-screens routine we’ve all seen before,” said Alex Redinger, Creative Producer at FxPro. “Instead, we wanted to create something human, memorable and genuinely funny. Trading doesn’t always have to look so serious, and neither does advertising.”
The audition also gives concrete meaning to the word “Pro” in the brand’s name. The candidates try to prove their professionalism through the way they speak and behave, while FxPro ties its message to the trading conditions, technology and order execution it offers its clients. Humour thus also serves as a way to tell the brand’s familiar promise through a situation in which everyone is acting a little too much.
The ad ends with a message that resolves the entire search: “You don’t have to act like a Pro to trade like one, you just need to trade with FxPro.”
