Shortlisted 2020

Financial Services

Brand

UBS

Entered by:

WP BrandStudio, The Washington Post

Credits:

Why Doing Good Can Be Good For Your Portfolio

The Challenge

The campaign objective was to establish UBS as an authority on the topic of sustainable investing.

Sustainable investing has picked up significant momentum in recent years, and UBS has been a committed industry leader at the forefront of the movement. As the world’s leading wealth manager, UBS has the capital, solutions and expertise to make a significant difference globally.

In this increasingly competitive landscape, The Washington Post was an ideal media partner to create and distribute trustworthy thought leadership content.

The Creative Solution

While nearly 70% of investors are willing to pay more for goods and services from companies whose values align with theirs, only 39% invest sustainably.

WP BrandStudio, the branded content arm of The Washington Post, developed a content strategy to inform and educate The Post’s influential audience on UBS’s expertise in this still emerging area of investing.

WP BrandStudio crafted a multimedia story that demonstrates the private sector’s increasing involvement in sustainability, the strategy’s promising results, as well as UBS’s long history of leadership in this area. WP BrandStudio sought to develop content that would be informative yet accessible for a UBS’s desired audience of high­ net worth individuals interested in sustainable investing. The original article is entitled “Why doing good can be good for your portfolio.”

The custom-designed article features insights from UBS executives and relevant experts, engaging visual elements, an interactive timeline section and a CTA encouraging readers to learn more about how they can make a difference with their portfolio.

The interactive timeline section features historical moment s in sustainability both inside and outside UBS, demonstrating how UBS has consistently been ahead of the curve .

Finally, the deeply-researched content cited 15 sources, including UBS-issued reports and third party outlets.

The Media/Content Amplification Solution

The branded content was distributed across Washington Post properties ,  on Apple  News  and on social  media . The  promotions  targeted  high-net  individuals interested in sustainable investing in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore and Hong Kong. We leveraged a mix of on and off-site products to deliver on UBS’s KPls and drive scale .

First, UBS leveraged some of The Washington Post’s industry leading advertising technology to deliver their content to the their desired audiences in premium contextual environments.

A primary on-site tactic was The Washington Post’s native promotional modules, which appear in-line with the site ‘s editorial content. These modules showcase imagery and multiple headlines from the branded article, e.g. “Can sustainable investing help you and your society?” Multiple versions of the unit (with varying promotional copy) run across the site, and our ad delivery system automatically optimize towards the better performing version.

We also leveraged a product called lnContext, which displays large pull-quotes embeded within contextually-relevant newsroom content. This product serves to showcase the expertise of UBS executives interviewed in the article. Because the promotional modules and lnContext are delivered in the most native context, they are a high driver of average time spent with the content.

Additionally, we distributed the article on trusted platforms beyond the desktop and mobile site to surpass the page view objective. We published the article in The Washington Post’s mobile app, which uniquely allows for the content to run in-stream alongside newsroom content.

We also promoted the content on relevant social media platforms (Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter) through paid and organic posts.

Finally, we drove traffic to the article through Apple News promotion . These vivid full-bleed promotional modules appear within Washington Post section fronts and articles on the iOS app .

The Result

The complementary content and media strategy were extremely successful and surpassed the states objectives of page views and average time spent with the content. In fact, as the campaign was nearing the end of its flight, UBS decided to extend the campaign (and corresponding investment) by another 6 weeks. The second flight also exceeded key performance objectives, indicating that the content continued to be of interest and relevancy to our readership.