The goal of this campaign was to create a truly distinctive, master-class-style content series, in conjunction with a credible media partner, that would engage a core audience of Enterprise C-suite executives and their influencers, as well as ultimately shift perceptions of EY—from being a traditional audit/accounting firm to a future-facing top consideration for broader consulting and strategy services.
To achieve this, we knew we needed to enlist a top-tier set of current EY leaders and their prestigious clients to participate in this series, and to hear them tell their experiences in an engaging way.
Success would ultimately be measured in both demonstrating a strong perception shift, quality time spent with our content by busy C-Suite executives, and the profile/stature of leading C-suite executives to participate in telling their and EY’s stories.
or this program, EY sought a high-visibility, top-tier and highly credible media partner that regularly connects with its target c-suite decision maker audience. The Wall Street Journal provided the perfect intersection of trusted business credibility, targeted reach, data quality, and creativity to help deliver on this creative campaign idea.
To inspire business leaders to spend quality time with this content, we developed highly produced, long-form video content that would exceed WSJ reader expectations. Leadership in Action was a unique activation on the WSJ website; it featured video commentary and testimonials from top CEOs and the EY leaders who advised them along the way. Focused on various themes such as maximizing shareholder and stakeholder value to thrive in the digital era, the videos were displayed as episodes with chapters that viewers could watch on demand. The approach showcased EY’s work through instructive, personal stories told by some of its most well-known clients that could be enjoyed by our time-pressed audience.
The WSJ Custom Content team then created a dedicated landing page to promote the full breadth of episodes, which included the videos and supporting articles that elaborated on the stories.The story format of the videos mirrored a typical master class, where viewers receive insights from experts, in a conversational and educational way.
To ensure our distribution strategy matched the rapidly evolving behaviors of our audience, we created a digital-first, future-facing media approach to match both EY’s message and our content. A robust, multi-channel promotional plan amplified the content on WSJ.com (targeting the U.S., Canada, and Brazil), Apple News, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and ads across premium news/business/sports Connected TV apps. Each episode was promoted via a Leadership in Action series takeover on the front of the WSJ Business Section. Advertising tactics included pre-roll trailer, high impact custom ad units as well as paid amplification across LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. EY also promoted the series on its own website and internally to its employees.
All this combined would create a distinctive, surround-sound approach to showcase this unique master class content to engage a difficult to reach C-Suite audience.
With nine episodes (and counting) featuring top tier Global CEOs from across industries in conversation with leaders from EY, the program has demonstrated EY’s expertise and influence. The ‘Leadership in Action’ series has delivered extraordinary results, as evidenced by an impressive program reach and strong average time spent metrics, video play rates, and video completion rates across episodes. The content resonated with our audience on mobile, as mobile display placements have delivered extremely strong CTRs, over triple our average. The video series continues to successfully connect with the C-Suite target audience, with users spending 4 times over benchmark engaging with the content, and completing the videos at rates 5 times above average. The content has also positively impacted the audience sentiment towards EY - based on multiple custom research studies we have executed, those who engaged with any of the videos were 2 times more likely to consider EY in the future than the average. The quality of the content, design and data cited strongly contributed to the improved impression of EY.
