OutFront

Highly Commended 2023

Financial Services

Brand

PGIM

Entered by:

Reuters

Credited:

Ptarmigan Media

The Challenge

How can asset managers capture attention, boost market leadership positioning and keep investors informed with topical trends during such volatile economic headwinds?

As PGIM, the global asset management arm of Prudential Financial, we wanted to create a unique way for investors to think about and navigate the financial markets, and in doing so change perceptions about what it means to be a leading authority in the asset management space.

To rise above the clutter of insights, we were willing to defy the usual conservative constraints of the sector and colour outside the lines by having an opinion and strong points of view across the macro issues prevalent in today’s economies. This was a risky move in a risk averse sector.

We also wanted to ensure our insights-led campaign captured the attention and so needed innovative solutions that went well beyond the sector’s conventional white papers and long blog posts.

For this campaign to work PGIM needed a trusted, established partner in the global financial space who could help them to take a provocative leadership position in a manner that resonated with the target audiences. Any media partner would need to have the authority and ability to inform investors about market moving data and trends deep within its DNA, and be a recognized force on the global stage.

The Content Solution

Reuters has been trusted to provide financial information to the world for more than 170 years, and it has more than 12 million financial decision makers among its audience, as confirmed by the Ipsos Global Affluent Survey 2022. Its recognized expertise among the investment community, coupled with the multimedia content capabilities of its in-house studio team Reuters Plus, made the company a great partner for PGIM.

Reuters Plus devised a series of expertly designed, animated, chaptered, infographic stories that would leverage PGIM’s own data and trends with Reuters’ own insights to create a bespoke experience that would grab the attention of the busy investor audience, and allow them to move seamlessly and quickly through an information rich, topical narrative.

Called “OutFront” the content series appeal to our audience’s desire to stay ahead of market news, and to meet the objective of aligning with PGIM’s overarching brand campaign “In Pursuit of Outperformance.”

Strong visuals reinforced the global reach as well as the gravitas of the themes PGIM wanted to address. Stories opened on a full-width page, with large, rotating spheres containing 3-D animations in line with story themes (ESG and Greenwashing; Record Debt; Inflation’s Uncertain Path) and an imposing statistic speaking to each theme.

Chaptered navigations let audiences choose their preferred journey – whether to explore market trends, investment strategies, geopolitical and regulatory issues, or economic outlooks. And along the way, dynamic, digestible – and sometimes surprising – graphics, visuals and data points reinforced PGIM experts’ insights and PGIMs brand themes.

The content was designed to provide chief investment officers with fast, actionable insights on their top areas of concern, including:

Greenwashing – facts, fiction and fiduciary duties
Where unknown market fragilities may lie
How to invest amid global inflation

PGIM and Reuters Plus believed this provocative route would work because it had a solid purpose: To offer its audiences authentic, sought-after new content beyond what they usually peruse in the asset management space.

The Media/Content Amplification Solution

The goal of the OutFront campaign was to drive Reuters’ institutional investor and chief investment officer audience directly to PGIM’s gated site, to gather potential leads. The success of this approach depended on both stellar design and expert coordination between Reuters, PGIM and its agency partner.

The eye-catching, animated globe created a compelling, consistent theme across Reuters and PGIM social properties and in high-impact ad units across Reuters.com. These were hyper-targeted to drive institutional investor/CIO audiences in the US, UK, Germany, Japan and Australia to PGIM’s site.

Large homepage “avalanche” units featured both a signature globe animation and chaptered content to create a mini-homepage within the unit.

The Reuters Plus team worked closely with its own amplification team, PGIM, and PGIM’s agency to coordinate and streamline the amplification process to ensure everything tracked well on Reuters.com to ensure we succeeded in meeting PGIM’s goals.

The Result

The content partnership smashed all benchmarks and over-delivered across the board.

Notable KPIs:

Reuters over-delivered the high-impact audience-targeted custom units by +17%, serving a total of 2,481,777 impressions.
PGIM’s custom high-impact avalanche, canvas, native, and billboard units collectively outperformed the Reuters benchmark by +10%.
On LinkedIn, Visualization #1 outperformed Reuters average LCTR benchmark by +92%.
On Twitter, Reuters Plus post outperformed Reuters average LCTR benchmark by +27%.

PGIM were so pleased with the results that they extended the campaign for another year, making 2023 the third year of the partnership.

Because “OutFront” content is gated, users had to identify themselves as either institutional investors or financial intermediaries before gaining access. The attestations of the target audience have been more than double what PGIM has seen in campaigns with other content partners. The campaign has provided PGIM with valuable first-party data on its target audiences that have helped with lead generation and other marketing efforts.

A senior PGIM executive said: “Kudos to the Reuters team for really good work. Your pieces are the only non-hub page pages that are in the top ten of our website traffic – you are in third place. And [CEO] David Hunt based his talking points at Milken [Institute] on the Deglobalization piece, and was then later quoted by the financial press, which is validation of all your work.”