The back story
Technology is significantly disrupting today’s business models and is doing so at an ever-increasing rate. KPMG’s goal is to build and facilitate the conversation around digital transformation, helping clients to benefit from the opportunities it provides and encouraging them to see us as their guide to a digital future.
The firm is recognised by analysts for the strength of its digital proposition, but a global brand tracking study showed that it ranked behind the other ‘Big Four’ competitors: EY, Deloitte and PwC.
revenue created
opportunities
engaged
engaged
rankings (from 5th)
The journey
Following the award-winning ‘Changing Futures’ Campaign, Rooster Punk was asked to evolve the story into one that further wove together KPMG’s consulting propositions and created a simple, overarching humanized narrative.
We set out to:
- Raise KPMG’s standing versus the other 5 technology consultancies
- Prove an integrated cross-practice proposition was achievable and persuasive
- Support tenders and key accounts with targeted ABM
- Discover new decision-makers and drive MQLs
- Deliver a pipeline of over £50m
The Audience
We conducted market testing with senior contacts from FTSE 250 to understand performance of our previous campaign and areas for improvement.
As such we again targeted our campaign and focussed our messaging towards the senior functional audience and their individual concerns when embarking on digital projects.
Rather than just focusing on traditional buyers of technology we identified the key transition buyers for our consulting business and aligned messaging to the business issues they faced. These included buyers and leads at Director level and above such as, CEO, Heads of Strategy, Head of Digital, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, CFO, CIO, CTO, CDO, CRO and COO.
Insight
We applied disruptive thinking to invert received wisdom – turning brand weaknesses into strengths and negativity into opportunity. KPMG was seen as ‘unsexy’ – partly due to its accountant roots, but we turned that into a strength.
In digital transformation you don’t want sexy, you want people you can rely on, who are honest enough to acknowledge that transformation is difficult and even scary. We created a story arc that mapped to the emotional journey our audience goes on – including doubt and fear – through digital transformation. By showing unusual honesty and empathy we opened doors and built trust.
The organizing story
In a world of many possible futures, it’s those who stand with you to the end, that will help determine yours.
Activation
The creative storyline followed the voyage of a customer contemplating and then going through digital transformation themselves in the advertising:
The campaign included 3 tiers of media advertising, each becoming more focussed in their messaging aims. T1 focussed on the broader Digital Transformation theme, T2 concentrated on KPMG’s connected consulting propositions and T3 drilled down more into specific case studies and success stories.
‘Changing Futures’ campaign in action, Rooster Punk and KPMG, 2019.
Tube advertising
As a high percentage of senior KPMG clients transit through Canary Wharf the campaign launched with a platform takeover, which also raised the visibility and pride internally.
Digital media and content
At its heart was an extensive media partnership with The Times. These can all be seen on our bespoke content hub here. All articles are achieving average dwell time of 123s (benchmark of 120) and on average over 10,000 unique visits per article.
Digital media was intelligently targeted and retargeted to align with the ‘journey’ and also used sophisticated programmatic targeting to expand the audience.
Radio
The diverse media mix continued with strategic podcasts including audio trails across TalkRadio and TalkSport to catch our key audience demographics and mirror their content consumption behaviour. Podcasts have generated 8,465 listens.
ABM
In line with KPMG’s belief in marketing innovation an ABM strategy was developed – powered with a digital dashboard using a suite of pre-built digital adverts that can be targeted at buyers for key accounts with 48 hours notice to support Key Business Tenders. The impact of this was significant on the overall ROI.
Social selling
The KPMG campaign also fully leveraged social media to influence and engage key buyers broadly and to support ABM during the pitch process.
Website
The bespoke web suite included both a digital transformation landing page, plus landing pages for each of our connected consulting businesses.
Digital pre-sales dashboard
Sitting behind all this was a brand new dashboard with the ability to:
- Build a clearer picture of account/ target priorities and buying signals
- Open/ expand existing or new relationships with buyers who may not know what we do
- Uncover significant cross-sell opportunities
- Grow revenue by getting into/ in front of RFPs
- Support sales decisions with additional targeted marketing and adverts