At Horizon, we uniquely understand the patient journey because for us, the work we do delivering medicines for rare, autoimmune and severe inflammatory diseases is personal. We created this authentic and inspiring video series to show how personal our mission truly is, by highlighting our employees’ and their families’ first-hand stories. This series aims to drive awareness, understanding and trust with existing and potential employees and partners, as well as others in our industry, of Horizon as a unique biotechnology company rooted in compassion.
The magic starts with CEO Tim Walbert, who was driven to create a company that supports those living with rare diseases, as a patient and caregiver himself. Today, our company has grown to over 2,000 passionate employees who joined Horizon because of our values, mission and culture. And each year we have the honor of highlighting several stories shared with us by communications business partners, managers, friends and the employees themselves, creating a united force in supporting one another and raising awareness. The challenge became: How do we best share these incredibly personal and emotion stories in a way that breaks through the noise? Enter Horizon’s 2022 It’s Personal video series.
The project features ten employee stories, through full length (<3:15 min) videos posted organically to social media monthly with three rotating featured videos on the corporate website’s careers section. In addition, these videos are shown across our internal office screens, highlighted on “The Pulse” intranet and included in our H5 newsletter. To grab additional attention on social media, and in line with current best practices, we created teaser clips (<:15) in 1:1, 4:5 and 9:16 specs to be used as ads across Horizon’s global LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, with a clear CTA driving to our corporate website to watch the full video and learn more about our company. All videos include captions for accessibility and for users scrolling with sound off.
From a paid social media perspective, we targeted the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry using a mixture of industry, hashtag, company, geo and additional parameters, partnering closely with our colleagues in talent management.
Across two full-day shoots in our U.S. headquarters on-campus studio, we set up one-hour interviews with each employee. As part of production, we shot behind-the-scenes footage using a roving camera to inject energy and finalized using black and white styling with docu-style typography, to best capture these emotional stories and answer our own challenge of how we best share them. Every story is different, brought together by the various ways our work is personal. From Dale who lives with multiple sclerosis and works on our medicine for a related disease called NMOSD, Graciela who woke up completely paralyzed from COVID-19 complications and now is back to work with a stronger drive to help patients than ever and Rita whose twin boys live with a debilitating rare disease requiring 24/7 care.
We launched campaigns across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter, all unique to the best specs and targeting parameters available to reach our audience, learning over time and rotating ads every few months. A majority of budget was set to LinkedIn, based on the industry and potential employee target audiences. As part of our launch strategy, across Facebook and LinkedIn we implemented an awareness and consideration funnel utilizing video views as an awareness tactic. Once a user watched a percentage of the video, they were retargeted with a conversion ad featuring similar story cuts driving them to visit our website to watch additional It’s Personal stories.
The It’s Personal video series has proven to be a success and an effective strategy for key objectives, including driving video views, landing page views and ultimately increasing Horizon’s brand awareness, reputation and recruitment efforts. The performance of last year’s series surpassed 2022 aggregates by 16% in terms of CTR and by 6% in terms of VVR, with a notable average video view length of 0:13 seconds on Facebook. Success was also measured by:
Beyond metrics, we’re extremely proud of the open and inclusive culture we’ve fostered at Horizon, exemplified successfully through these stories. By using learnings from past video campaigns to drive strategic decisions and making efficient use of resources, Horizon's corporate communications team is able to harness incredible momentum and energy and create internal, executive and digital communications as part of its “newsroom” engine that speak to what matters most – showing how the company supports and enables and amazing team to go to incredible lengths for patients.
