Finalist 2024
Small Budget: Great Impact
Brand
Bayer
Entered by:
POLITICO
Drive Sustainable Progress
The Challenge
2023 was set to be a pivotal year in the European Union for both sides of Bayer’s business: the Commission was slated to unveil the first update of the EU’s pharmaceutical legislation in twenty years, while the agricultural industry would be juggling the impacts of the EU’s climate targets and the war in Ukraine.
At the same time, the world was facing mounting crises — climate change, lack of food availability, biodiversity loss, water shortages, rising cancer rates — and Bayer wanted its 2023 campaign to show how the company was tackling these challenges and supporting EU policymakers to shape a better future for our people and planet.
The challenge for POLITICO: get policymakers to appreciate Bayer’s innovative work and support regulatory frameworks that will help it flourish.
To do this we needed to humanize the Bayer brand. Emotion, maybe counterintuitively, is especially important in business-to-government (and business-to-business) decision-making because it involves trust — the stories we’re telling help policymakers make important decisions, so they need to trust what we’re telling them.
Furthermore, POLITICO Media Solutions research (https://www.politico.eu/media-solutions-democracy-spotlight/) shows that policymakers look to businesses for anecdotes that help make macro policy debates tangible. Companies that lean on local insights are particularly powerful.
This was our challenge: How could we humanize a big corporate brand like Bayer, and show the on-the-ground impact of their policy asks?
The Content Solution
In a nutshell: Through candid conversations that unveil the people behind Bayer’s innovations and explore the personal motivations behind their work.
2023 was the third year that Bayer collaborated with POLITICO on Drive Sustainable Progress, a custom content series created in partnership with POLITICO Studio, that explores the latest innovations driving positive change. While the first years focused on technical content, this year we wanted to showcase the people behind Bayer’s innovations in crop science and health care to create emotional resonance with our audience of policymakers.
POLTICO Studio created two video portraits that offered our readers the chance to go behind the scenes of Bayer’s labs and hear directly from their innovators. We asked them big-picture questions such as: What motivates them? What are they hoping to achieve? And how do they see their work benefiting society? These frank conversations naturally generated empathy with our audience, building positive brand association.
In the first video, Franziska Siegel, a research scientist at Bayer, based in Berlin, talked about her family’s history with cancer driving her work to develop innovative cancer treatments and how bold EU regulations can give patients new hope. In the second video, Timothy Broke-Smith of digital healthcare company Huma, based in London, described how remote patient-monitoring solutions could have given him more time with his father and why access to health data is essential to unlock the potential of digital health.
Then, for POLTICO’s first-ever photo essay, a photojournalist and producer team spent time with farmers in three countries — Poland, Germany and Spain — to discover the impact of climate change on their work, the future they see for their families and their industry, and the tools they’ve adopted to counter high temperatures, unpredictable weather and drought.
Innovative technology such as GPS software that ensures tractors spray precise amounts of products, and apps that control exactly how much water is used to irrigate, support farmers to prepare for the future and keep feeding their families — and the rest of us. The article ended with a call for a regulatory framework that fosters access to innovation to ensure that farmers can withstand the challenges of the coming years. Interactive sliders, GIFs and slideshows made the page extra dynamic and engaging.
Video 2: https://www.politico.eu/sponsored-content/transforming-everyday-health-one-app-at-a-time/
Photo essay: https://www.politico.eu/sponsored-content/can-innovation-help-farmers-adapt-to-climate-change/
Hub: https://www.politico.eu/sponsored-content/drive-sustainable-progress-hub/
The Media/Content Amplification Solution
To keep Bayer in the minds of policymakers throughout the year, we created a truly integrated campaign, with always-on media activations (on POLITICO.eu, X, Facebook, YouTube and Google), event add-ons and sponsorships to support each piece of content. We refreshed our Drive Sustainable Progress hub throughout the year as new content was released.
The first half of the campaign focused on the pharmaceuticals side of Bayer’s business, launching in the spring, just as the Commission was about to release the pharma legislation. The video portrait of research scientist Franziska kicked off the campaign. A few weeks later (24 hours before the EU published its pharma strategy), a live, in-person event convened EU policymakers and healthcare experts for an interactive discussion about improving access to innovation in Europe’s health care sector. Bayer showed the video before its opening remarks [https://www.politico.eu/event/breaking-barriers-in-innovation-and-access-can-the-pharma-legislation-do-it-all/], capturing the audience’s attention. We published the second video portrait in July, giving our audience fresh content. Bayer also sponsored our Morning Health Care newsletter twice during this period, with sponsor messages driving home our core campaign themes.
For the second half of the year, we focused on Bayer’s innovations in crop science. After a quiet August, Brussels springs back to life in September, and our campaign leveraged this by publishing the photo essay during the high-traffic “back to school” period.The three countries covered in the photo essay gave us ample content for promotion over the next few months. Bayer also sponsored our Morning Agriculture & Food newsletter twice during this period.
Bayer was a presenting partner of POLTICO’s flagship sustainability event, Sustainable Future Week, which took place in November and brings top-notch European and international policymakers, scientists, NGO and industry leaders to Brussels. Again integrating the in-person and online experiences, POLITICO Studio curated and produced an eight-meter exhibition of photos and excerpts from the photo essay, driving conversations over the three days of the event. The exhibit also included a video element with extra photographs and quotes. 850 people attended the 2023 event.
The Result
Our content formula of hooking readers with human stories followed by a policy call to action – amplified in person and online – was hugely impactful.
2023 was the most successful year for POLITICO and Bayer for the Drive Sustainable Progress campaign, with branded content generating 44% more visits compared with the previous year.
The video portraits exceeded benchmarks several times over. Our video with research scientist Franziska delivered nearly 2x our benchmark for pageviews, with an average time on page of 3+ minutes. The second video, with Timothy, achieved even better results: nearly 4x our benchmark for pageviews, video completion rate 25% over benchmark, and an average time on page of more than 4.5 minutes.
Our first-ever photo essay was among the top 5 best-performing content pieces across all POLITICO Studio pieces published in 2023. Compared to other bespoke immersive pages, it achieved 2x the number of pageviews. Users spent on average 5 minutes interacting with the piece.
And the content was prescient: In February, five months after we drew attention to farmers’ struggles, farmers from across Europe rallied in Brussels. Bayer hosted our photo exhibition within the European Parliament just one week after the protests, under the title “Innovations for sustainable agriculture in Europe.”
At the opening event, organized by Bayer, keynotes were delivered by MEP Asger Christensen (Renew), who spoke about the impact the online photo essay had on him personally, MEP Michaela Sojdrová (EPP), as well as Jens Hatmaan, head of EMEA of Bayer Crop Science.
The exhibition was the perfect conclusion to our year-long campaign: displayed inside the decision-making center of the EU, it clearly showed the far-reaching social impact that our partnership could have.