How Peer-To-Peer Stories Drove Huge Brand Uplift With The World’s Leaders

Finalist 2024

Small Budget: Great Impact

Brand

Withers

Entered by:

Financial Times

The Challenge

International law firm Withers specialises in advising successful individuals on their business, personal and philanthropic interests. Back in 2021, it set out to own this space by conveying its expertise to new and existing clients.

To achieve this, it wanted to bring to life its fresh perspectives on leadership, managing risk and handling problems. In response, the FT team devised a compelling campaign called ‘Defining Moments’ – a branded content series of interview-style articles, where eminent founders and CEOs revealed the events and influences that turned them into leaders.

Fast forward to 2023, when the resounding success of that campaign inspired Withers to continue its FT partnership – this time with a refreshed design and a new thematic focus.

The new campaign’s objectives:

To continue developing a brand identity for Withers that would reinforce its position as the law firm for success – building on our existing campaign identity while showing a clear evolution for year 2
To cement that perception of the brand among the FT’s global audience of wealthy and influential leaders

The challenge:

To retain the human, peer-to-peer element that underpinned the strong performance of the earlier campaign by creating a second interview-based series – which needed to align to ‘Defining Moments’ while offering its audience something new.

The Content Solution

Strategy
Our strategy for developing the content was to reflect the fact that all sectors of society are having to rethink long-held viewpoints and adopt new perspectives. It’s increasingly important for a range of opinions to be heard.

Having seen the FT audience engage strongly with personal stories from influential individuals, we wanted to harness Withers’ impressive client portfolio again. Each interview would profile an inspiring individual from a range of industries, from food and drink to agriculture and real estate. The concept underpinning the series would be the transformative potential of adopting new perspectives, through content designed to inspire, educate and nurture the target audience.

To emphasise continuity with the previous campaign while creating a distinct identity for the new campaign, the 2023 content would live in its own section within the existing Withers ecosystem on ft.com.
Content

The FT content team created six interview-style articles, profiling visionary Withers clients such as ‘Womenomics’ pioneer Kathy Matsui, green fuel entrepreneur Rinaldo Brutoco, and Bea Bakshi who co-founded an AI-powered cancer detection system.

Each shared their viewpoint on the future of their industry and talked about an event or individual that triggered a change in their perspective and sparked their groundbreaking work.

For brand consistency, the content matched the deeply personal tone of the 2021 campaign and the articles featured bespoke header illustrations in a similar style. But to spark interest with a fresh approach, the FT team used narrative visualisation or ‘scrollytelling’ that brought these conversations to life by mimicking the flow of a conversation. This played to our audience’s appetite for immersive content.

Throughout the interviews, miniature illustrations of relevant objects, people or concepts acted as visual cues to support the storytelling – and to lean into the fact that on-page furniture prolongs audience engagement with FT partner content.

We also embedded a short audio clip of each interview in the piece, to add an immersive element and showcase the most compelling soundbites of the conversation.

The Media/Content Amplification Solution

Our marketing team designed a high-impact marketing campaign to reach Withers’ target audience groups.

We carried the look and feel of the content through to the marketing campaign, for a creative execution that attracted readers and gave them a seamless journey. The campaign included traffic-driving FT.com display ads and native ad units featuring bespoke illustrations of the interviewees from the articles.

Amplified with social promotion on LinkedIn and Twitter, it delivered tremendous results.

**Onsite marketing delivered an outstanding CTR that was almost 170% over benchmark
* FT marketing delivered an additional 700k impressions on top of the 898k million planned

We targeted users through LinkedIn and Twitter to enhance engagement and bring the content to life for our highly-qualified audience. By leveraging the detailed targeting options available on these platforms, we were able to reach a highly specific audience interested in the stories of influential leaders and why success is not always a linear journey.

On LinkedIn, we used professional demographics, job titles, industries, and company sizes to ensure our content reached professionals who would find value in these stories. We also took advantage of LinkedIn’s interest targeting to focus on users who have shown interest in leadership, innovation, and industry trends.

On Twitter, we used a combination of keyword targeting, interest categories, and follower lookalikes to identify users who are likely to be engaged with content about influential leaders. By targeting users who follow or engage with accounts similar to our own, we ensured our content reached a relevant audience.

Importantly, we set up intricate targeting based on insights from the first iteration of the campaign. We analysed the performance data to identify audience segments showing the highest engagement and adjusted our targeting criteria accordingly. This iterative approach allowed us to fine-tune our audience targeting, ensuring we reached users most likely to be interested in the stories of these visionary leaders.

Through these targeted efforts, we were able to effectively bring our content to life and connect with an audience that values the insights and experiences of influential leaders.

The Result

‘The Discourse’ exceeded even the standout performance of Withers’ 2021 campaign – in fact, it was one of the FT’s top-performing partner content campaigns of 2023. Given the strong brand uplift results the campaign punched far above its weight compared to the spend.

Huge brand uplift

The remarkable results of the post-campaign brand uplift study showed that the brand positioning was highly effective and captured our valuable audience’s attention.

The readers exposed to the Withers partner content and associated pages were:

• 100% more likely to say they would consider using Withers
• 50% more likely to use Withers’ services in the future
• 125% more likely to say that Withers is their preferred legal firm**

Smashed targets

Not a single content piece performed at or below benchmark – in fact, even the lowest average attention time was 27 seconds above it

Across 6 articles we received over 40K page views – nearly 9K over target

The audio clips proved highly engaging, with a listen-through rate of 64.71%

FT marketing delivered an additional 700k impressions on top of the 898k million planned

Withers’ intended audience groups were effectively targeted and captured in large numbers, with 59% of the known audience falling into Business Decision-Makers and C-Suites (1st party demographic identified users)

Onsite marketing delivered an outstanding click-through rate that was almost 170% over benchmark

Stronger client connection with FT audience

Withers is now benefiting strongly from a growing relationship with the FT audience. Since our partnership began, FT readers are 8 times more likely to say that Withers is their preferred legal firm and over 4 times more likely to consider using Withers for legal services.