The Risk Opportunity

Bloomberg’s audience comes to the platform for information that allows them to gain a competitive advantage, so the idea of creating a campaign about turning risk into a business opportunity made huge sense. Considering the detail required and the nuance necessary for such complex subject matter, we decided on a podcast series as the ideal content solution.

The Risk Opportunity took the form of a four-part series that explored how to turn adversity into opportunity:

1. Using Risk to Build Resilience: how challenges can offer an opportunity to build resilience – and even change for the better.
2. How to Power Climate Resilience: lessons learned from places like post-earthquake Haiti, adaptation and resilience in the context of climate change, and the technologies that could save us.
3. The Business of Net-Zero: operational challenges, regional disparities and the new role of the risk manager.
4. Tools for a Resilient Future: running a business in the age of the polycrisis, and the tools required to build a more resilient future.
   The episodes took the format of a host-led roundtable discussion, capped at 30 minutes to keep them focused. Financial journalist Danni Hewson was our host, and each episode featured two guests – one from Zurich and one external expert. We kept the group small to encourage deep conversation and debate.
   We invested significant time at pre-production stage, casting experts with rich experience, and writing scripts informed by proprietary Bloomberg data and exclusive Zurich research. We introduced guests before the record so the conversation would flow more easily and provided all kit and instructions for remote records for quality sound.

Bloomberg Green & Leaders with Lacqua Goes Green

The Leaders with Lacqua sponsorship program placed Zurich at the forefront of Bloomberg TV, as Bloomberg Europe’s highest profile news anchor interviewed global leaders with a positive influence in areas of climate and sustainability.
One of the most high-profile guests was John Podesta, White House Senior Advisor for Clean Energy Innovation and Implementation. To deliver best possible reach, profile and impact for the series, this interview was integrated to the Bloomberg Live Green Summit event in New York. As partners cannot sponsor live content at Bloomberg Live events, we delivered quasi ownership of this flagship content by preceding the interview with a Sponsor Spotlight moment – a video showcasing Zurich’s work in the Brazilian rainforest – and following the interview with a supplied 30” Zurich TVC.

The podcasts,

Zurich-supplied videos, contextualising copy and links to Zurich’s Global Risk Report and White Paper, ‘Accelerating the Climate Transition’ were all contained in one collection page on Bloomberg.com.

For the podcasts, we used custom native traffic drivers, bespoke high impact display units, pre-and mid-roll audio cut-downs against Bloomberg audio content, as well as social amplification. This ensured extensive reach to commercial audiences in key US locations such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Atlanta, and Washington D.C., as well as in the UK – two core markets for its commercial interests.

The series was also supported by targeted video content aimed at C-suites, BDMs, risk managers, insurance brokerage companies, and key influencers in urban centres.
Video content represents huge levels of recent growth for Bloomberg – following a 90% increase in cross-platform video audience growth current volumes are 55m monthly unique viewers, 123m total monthly video views – and there’s a 44% increase in watch time.

To ensure maximum engagement with Zurich’s supplied videos, we used custom native traffic drivers, bespoke high-impact ad units and mid-roll video cut-downs. These were targeted to the UK and specific US cities to maximise impact through high share of voice. Mid-roll-only cut-downs were used to drive highest possible VCR.
For the sponsorship of Leaders with Lacqua series, we capitalised on the success of the Bloomberg Green multi-platform editorial franchise, with a rotational sponsorship of this section on Bloomberg.com. High-impact bespoke ad units were combined with standard banners and video –pre-roll and ran Zurich-supplied pre- and mid-roll video assets against the sponsored interview content.

From similar 2022 activity, we knew that relevant contextual environment (i.e. Green) to align Zurich’s brand video would prove to be extremely successful with benchmark exceeding performance. When honing in on geo breaks, we also saw previously that the US showed strongest VCR out of the geos, so we upweighted to give Zurich maximum exposure.

An additional always-on element was added to support the sponsorship, using high-impact bespoke display unit – Ad.Apt Image – vs the core C-Suite audience, as we know this unit drives around three times higher CTR than standard banners. Standard banners were added to maximise frequency to add to the already strong engagement activity.

On Bloomberg TV, we used a combination of supplied TVC with Bloomberg editorial -created 30” tune-in promotional slots and 10” sponsor attribution billboards to ensure strong association and ownership signalling between the content and Zurich.