Workday: Passion Points

Challenge

John Maynard Keynes was a brilliant economist. But he didn’t get everything right.

In 1930 he predicted that by 2030 we’d only be working 15 hours a week.

Instead, today’s biggest work trend is the blurring boundaries between work and leisure.

That extends to our crossover consumption of lifestyle and professional content. We read industry news on the sofa at home and follow big sports events while at work.

Workday wanted to harness this major trend in order to stand out from its competitors. It aimed to target C-suites in both their professional and leisure time – aligning its brand with not only their work interests, but also their off-duty hobbies and passions.

So our challenge was to maximise reach and brand uplift by creating inspiring new content that spoke to these passions.

Brand:

Entered by:

Objectives:

To raise awareness of Workday’s products and services with our business decision-maker and C-suite readers.
To make Workday stand out from its competitors by aligning with this influential audience’s key leisure interests.
To maximise engagement by creating new editorial content that inspires this audience and speaks to their passion points.
To maximise Workday’s brand uplift from the campaign – and measure it.

Content Solution

Our longstanding partnership with Workday included successful campaigns in 2021 and 2002.

So we based our content strategy on hard data, credible insights, and the most effective platforms from those campaigns.

The platforms:

FT Scoreboard, a video channel covering the business of sport. We know that C-suites over-index on our sport-related content by 846%.
FT Globetrotter, our city life hub. We know that C-Suites over-index on tennis content by 1,102%. And our 2022 campaign The Joy of Tennis campaign had launched to huge applause from our audience.
Working It, our innovative workplace podcast. We know that Workday’s target audience over-index on content relating to work-life balance by 953%, and the award-winning ‘Working It’ regularly features in Apple’s top podcast charts.
FT Tech Champions, our series showcasing companies using new technology to rise to business challenges. We know that 56% agree that newspapers are the best platforms to make them aware of technology providers.

The pillars:

Using these insights and platforms, we created an editorial campaign sponsored by Workday. Centred around two pillars, it focused on the topics that our C-suite readers over-index on and engage with most.

Pillar one: Lifestyle content – exploring C-suites’ passions and hobbies.

The Wonder of Wimbledon, a series celebrating the world’s greatest Grand Slam – from where to watch the tennis in style, to what’s behind the tournament’s enduring appeal.
FT Scoreboard, a video series exploring different sports from different angles – from the Messi-Renaldo rivalry, to padel’s investment opportunities.

Pillar two: Leadership content – exploring trends on the future of work and technology.

Tech Champions, a series on the technologies changing industries like finance, healthcare and education. We issued a call-out for entries, then profiled the most exciting companies.
Working It, the weekly podcast making sense of the changing world of work. For this series, the editor and guest experts discussed topics from productivity to office politics.

Media/Content Amplification Solution

The FT’s marketing team harnessed social media to attract a broader base of users and drive them back to engage with the content on FT.com, amplifying the content with LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.

This provided us with a mixture of robust job demographic targeting and behavioural and interest. We combined these to capture C-suites and business decision-makers very effectively, using key leisure interests matching the content themes and attracting people more likely to take action and engage with Workday.

The fact that the campaign ran for over a year gave us more opportunity to use the data we were collecting to understand the profile of highly-engaged users, so we could further optimise our promotion on FT.com and social media. These optimisations included A/B testing of creatives, headlines and audience groups.

And we used retargeting segments to reach users who had engaged with previous content in the series and who we already knew engaged well with our content, building on brand familiarity and guiding them down the marketing funnel.

Total video views of FT Scoreboard.

Total page views of Workday sponsored content on FT Tech Champions.

0 %

Brand awareness of Workday by the FT audience increased by over a third.

Results

The campaign surpassed multiple benchmarks and smashed multiple targets. Better yet, it changed perceptions of Workday.

Brand awareness has gone up by a third, brand consideration is at 70%, and the perception of Workday as a market leader has jumped from 24% to 42%.

Huge brand impact

An impressive 70% of FT readers surveyed will consider using Workday in the future – making it the most considered brand over similar providers.

64% see Workday as ‘trustworthy’ – an uplift of 78% from 36% in 2023.

42% see Workday as a market leader – an uplift of 75% from 24% in 2023.

FT readers have become much more familiar with Workday – in fact, the percentage who say they are “very familiar” has doubled since 2023.

Brand awareness of Workday has increased by a third.

Strong engagement across the board.

FT Scoreboard generated 478k video views – and the best-performing video saw an extraordinary average view duration of 7 minutes 38 seconds.

Working It achieved 69,802 impressions and attracted 28,425 unique listeners.

FT Globetrotter achieved 88,225 page views.

Tech Champions amassed 194,035 page views, exceeding the target by 11%.

At the heart of this campaign’s success was our relationship with Workday. The mutual trust and understanding that comes from years of working together enabled us to create a powerful campaign – and Workday’s brand awareness is going from strength to strength each year.