By 2050 there will be 10 billion people on the planet, and they will all need something to eat. How are we going to feed the planet in a sustainable way, that doesn’t exhaust the earth’s resources?

This is the challenge that confronts Corteva Agriscience. As the only major agriscience company completely dedicated to agriculture, their challenge is to ensure that agriculture progresses and thrives, helping to move our world forward.

Becoming a stand-alone company in June 2019, by combining the strengths of DuPont Pioneer, DuPont Crop Protection and Dow AgroSciences, Corteva Agriscience wanted to launch themselves onto the world stage with a global announcement, with the aim of swiftly establishing themselves as a leader in the agriscience industry and creating a corporate brand strategy through a multi-layered partnership .

BBC StoryWorks, the creative studio from BBC Global News, applied the BBC lens to  the brief, focusing on the client’s objectives and what our audiences  would want  to know about a sustainable food future, to create and end-to-end strategy for Corteva Agriscience.

Studies show that when something alerts us to the fact that we may not know what happens next, we are compelled to listen more carefully. The neuroscientific term for this is the ‘Zeigarnik effect’, whereby our brain pays a whole different level of attention to something that appears incomplete – or which we can’t easily complete in our own mind. And from this, the viewer or listener gains a completely new perspective and gains a new value.

Feeding an ever-growing population is one such area, and our strategy throughout was to make this campaign valuable for our audiences. We wanted to tell them everything they needed to know about how this could be achieved and what the challenges were. By harnessing agriculture’s brightest minds and expertise, we wanted to enrich the lives of those who produce and those who consume, ensuring progress for generations to come. How could we achieve this? Through authentic and powerful storytelling, capturing the imagination of our audiences, while reducing the information gap between field and fork.

We wanted to take our audiences on a journey, to explore whether and how technological innovation and modern agriculture can rise to this challenge. Welcome to “Follow the Food.”

Follow the Food is a unique editorial offering across BBC World News and BBC.com that followed our food from the field to fork, bringing the farmer and consumer closer together. The eight-part documentary series questioned where our food came from and how this will change in the near future, thanks to new technologies and innovative ways of farming. Each episode tackled one major food challenge, selecting several case studies from across the globe, and showcasing the progressive and exciting steps that we are taking to reset how we feed the planet – and how our modern agriculture is leading the way.

Alongside this we commissioned and created a series of eight short branded content documentaries from North America, Europe, Asia and Brazil, demonstrating how Corteva Agriscience and its partners are addressing challenges across our food system.

In June 2019, Follow the Food was seen by 31 million viewers worldwide.

The dedicated bbc.com page had 894,923 page views and 5.6M video views across 8 weeks, with ‘Where does your food come from?’ being the second best performing article across the BBC platform, in its launch week.

The targeted social campaign generated:

• 17M impressions
• 56M clicks to the Follow The Food page and BBC Reel playlist We also received 1M video plays on the branded documentaries.

An Adscore survey, covering both TV and digital campaigns in 14 markets around the world, reported that the likelihood of recommending Corteva increased by 345% amongst BBC consumers, with uplifts across all key brand metrics (including that CA was a market leader).

To further evaluate the success of the campaign, we used BBC Global News’ award winning research programme, ‘Science of Engagement’, to measure the emotional impact on audiences, and correlating brand effect for Corteva Agriscience, of the branded documentary ‘Food by Prescription’ with Business Decision Makers in key markets. ‘Science of Engagement’ combines facial coding eye-tracking technologies with an embedded implicit association test to demonstrate the impact of the branded content.

It revealed that after watching the brand film, there were significant uplifts in subconscious association between Corteva Agriscience and key traits, Innovative (↑ 57%), Responsible (↑55%) and a Leader (↑33%). We saw a ↑63% uplift in association for Corteva Agriscience with audiences exposed to the content expressing that the company was “enriching the lives of people around the world.”

Overall, the multi-layered partnership :

• Increased Corteva Agriscience’s brand familiarity, helping to launch them as a new company
• Significantly improved Corteva Agriscience’s brand perception as prestigious and high quality, being seen as an industry leader
• The campaign’s creative strategy was successful, increasing the talkability of the brand and their perception of relevance