Winner 2018
TECHNOLOGY & TELECOMS
Brand
WORKPLACE
Lead Agency
GYRO
WORKPLACE BY FACEBOOK QUARTZ PARTNERSHIP
The Challenge
Workplace is Facebook’s business collaboration platform, and it launched to paying customers in October 2017.
Despite Facebook being the parent company, awareness of Workplace is low. To compound this, it is operating in a cluttered marketplace competing against tech behemoths, who bundle collaboration software, and specialist
solutions such as Slack.
There is a need to overcome buyer inertia and their tendency to stick with incumbent tech solutions and to do this we needed to drive credibility and deliver stand out from the likes of Slack, Yammer, Asana and G-suite (Google).
Furthermore, we had to convince our target audience of C-Suite, ‘visionary leaders’ across companies of 500-10,000 employees, that Workplace by Facebook is an effective Enterprise technology solution. Key geographies for this campaign were the US and EMEA.
The Strategy
The power of Workplace lies in its ability to connect people. It has a familiar interface – if you can use Facebook, you can use Workplace – that if embraced by a business, can give every employee a voice.
This was our starting point. Our own research showed us that CEOs believe company culture is critical to the success of their organisation; we needed to identify the type of visionary leaders that could see the potential of Workplace as a catalyst to stimulate and grow company culture.
With its disruptor mind-set, unique take on delivering global business news and mobile-first approach, Quartz would provide us with a concentration of the type of visionary leader we were looking for. Plus, with a large millennial
readership, we’d be able to leverage an important influencer audience.
Given a key objective was to drive credibility, we recommended a media partnership approach as with the right partner we would be able to leverage the trust between audience and media brand to the benefit of Workplace. Our
partnership with Quartz was fortuitously timed, as they were planning the launch of their new brand, Quartz at Work.
Quartz had noticed a trend over time that the content most engaged with on their site was focused on themes around the future of work, management and personal development. This was the perfect contextual environment
for Workplace and we worked with the team at Quartz to develop a programme that made Workplace the exclusive technology sector launch partner of Quartz at Work, along with a suite of branded content and native advertising that spanned three months and targeted US and EMEA.
The Implementation
A wide range of activity was delivered as part of Workplace’s sponsorship of the launch of Quartz at Work. The key pillar of this was a custom content series, designed to create standout and build credibility for the Workplace brand.
This contained three ‘Bulletin’ content pieces, built around core topics of interest to our audience. They included:
- Network vs. hierarchy structures in the modern workplace
- How business collaboration tools like Workplace can help employees improve their performance and standing on the job
- How the bot ecosystem built by Workplace can use bots to increase employee happiness and productivity at work
These bulletins were supported with paid promotion on Twitter and Facebook. Other content included a sponsorship of Quartz at Work’s ‘Daily Brief’ newsletter, as well as a range of display advertising, co-branded launch
units, and content extension on Flipboard, Google newsstand and Pocket.
There was also a Brand Survey to help unearth readers’ reactions to Workplace content on Quartz.
Content was considered on a micro level to improve the chance of it landing and being shared. We used customised illustrations to draw readers’ attention and create a sense of uniqueness. Bulletins were interspersed with statistics
we knew would be of interest to our audience, and headlines were A/B tested to discover the most ‘shareable’ way to tell a story.
Display ads used eye-catching full-bleed photography and clear calls to action to create intrigue and push people towards action. We also created ‘snackable’ insightful content, such as infographics and audio whitepapers. These
formats proved to be very popular amongst our audience.
The Result
For our Bulletin articles:
54,608 total article views and over a million integrated content placement impressions were delivered
There were over 50,000 interactions with our content, and a total of 1,164 clicks on our content
There were also close to 15,000 social actions, with over 7,000 social referrals.
We saw an incredible interaction rate of 289% on a Bulletin – that’s 90x the Quartz benchmark.
Daily Brief:
Our Daily Brief sponsorship beat Quartz’s own benchmark click-through rates:
2.51% in EMEA, 2.95% in Asia and 1.62% in the Americas
Open rates were also strong:
27.98% in EMEA, 20.84% in Asia and 26.12% in the Americas.
The campaign was a great success for Workplace and critically,our brand uplift study showed a huge 41% increase in respondents who associated Workplace with workplace collaboration tools. Amongst C-suite, VP, Director and
Entrepreneur audience types, association grew by 10%. Lead generation units such as infographics and whitepapers, also delivered an impressive 342 leads.
These strong results are proof that a strong brand partnership can deliver success for like-minded companies. It’s a partnership we hope will continue to develop and blossom in the future.