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- [00:00]
Fergus O'Carroll
Welcome to OnStrategy Showcase. I'm Fergus O'Carroll in Chicago. As you hopefully know by now, we're recording live in Los Angeles at TBWA Chiatay's offices. The theme is brands and entertainment and we have representation on the panel from the studios within LA as well as the agencies. We're going to have a really great conversation about brand entertainment and where branded content is going. Excited about that. The other thing I wanted to mention is that we are actually going to be recording live in Chicago, which will be the last live show of the year. We're going to be doing it on Thursday, December 5th, and we're about to finalize our location tomorrow. I'm super excited about it. I can't talk about it yet, but what I can talk about is our theme. I was debating what to do and how to tie in something that was relevant to Chicago. And while I came up with a couple of ideas, I was thinking to myself, well, this is kind of Christmas time. People's heads are in different places. The holiday season is here. So I was thinking we should actually do a show, a live show that is all around looking at the best of holiday advertising for this year and from past years on an international basis. And I'm super excited about it. I think it'll be fun. I think it'll be part of a sort of a holiday themed event. It'll be relaxed, people can chill, have drinks, have holiday snacks and stuff and make it a ton of fun. So look for some more details on that. It'll be in Downtown Chicago on December 5th from 6 to 8pm get some child care and make sure that you come along and have some fun with us. Here is a clip from today's episode.
- [01:50]
Eric Peterson
For years we had been trying to connect essentially brand to demand measurement and for various reasons had been running into obstacles. And it was always my nightmare that, you know, so the workday CFO is going to say, what have we gotten for the tens of million dollars that we've spent? And we were going to talk about perception data. This process, right, of knowing we wanted to create a case study actually forced us to connect what the brand work means versus the sales lead, potential revenue. And that was, I think if it were not for the goal of really wanting to hold ourselves accountable, we still might not have gotten there. And so I think, you know, again, awards, are they good, are they bad? I mean, I think that's going to change from organization to organization. But in our case it really helped us make, make us more accountable.
- [02:44]
Fergus O'Carroll
So workday is a brand that has been built over the last. I think it's 19 to 20 years. I think they celebrate their 20th anniversary next year. And they've done some reasonably good work over the years and have really grown out of serving the human resour department within companies, but they always had the ability to also serve the financial department. And so this campaign was all about extending the brand from its perceived focus on HR into a more broader focus of both HR and financials and finance. So I was excited to get the conversation with these guys going. It was a Gold Fe winner and we're excited that we have our alliance with the Effie Awards. And so we've been a part of picking through some of the best cases coming out of 2024 and we'll continue to do next year and also some other amazing, cool collaborations that our show is going to have with Effie next year, both in terms of live shows and in terms of other activations in various different locations and within the show itself. So I'm super excited about that. As part of this workday campaign, there was a Super bowl spot, which many of you may remember. It was one of those spots that took advantage of celebrity to the end degree. They had a bunch of celebrities on there and you'll hear the spot and I'll play actually one or one or two of them after I stop talking right now. But Joan Jett, Billy Idol, Ozzy Osbourne, Gwen Stefani, Travis BARKER, Gary Clark Jr. Paul Stanley from Kiss, all of these in pretty much two or three TV spots and playing these guys in sort of comedic roles. So I thought it was good, good work to share with you. And it was the super bowl spot. Other spots spun out of this over a period of time that have sort of built up this level of equity in this. I'm not sure if they have something planned for a Super bowl in January or February of 2025. I don't know that yet. But it'll be fun to see where they end up going with this. As I was thinking about this and we heard from the client in this conversation, it's gotta be difficult not only to decide to do a Super bowl spot as a B2B brand, because this is a B2B case. And when you think about the cost per targeted impression, it's hard to make that case. And the other point that the client brought up in this conversation was how critical it is not only that you decide to do a Super bowl spot, but you've got to make sure that you don't want to finish in the bottom half of the ratings in USA Today and et cetera. So there's massive pressures to make sure you get at least into the top 10. I hadn't really thought about that reality. That may be obvious to most people, but I was like, yeah, first you got convince your client, but then once you get them convinced, you got to make sure that you are are among the top rated spots. Otherwise you have completely failed on a whole different level. So this is a conversation with the great folks at Workday. It's Eric Peterson is a senior director of global advertising strategy and operations at Workday in San Francisco. And Jared Grunner. Gruner was the. Was at Ogilvy when he worked on this account. He's now a founder of a consultancy called Zero Fight or Zero Fight. I think I kept getting that wrong in the show. And he is based in Los Angeles. So great episode. I hope you enjoy it and I hope to see you in Chicago on December 5th for our holiday show. Enjoy.
- [06:26]
Jared Gruner
I can't believe you corporate types are still at it. Just stop calling each other rock stars.
- [06:31]
Fergus O'Carroll
And using Workday to put fire. Hey, man.
- [06:33]
Eric Peterson
And HR on one platform. Tim, you are a rockstar.
- [06:36]
Jared Gruner
Using responsible AI doesn't make you a rockstar.
- [06:40]
Fergus O'Carroll
Kind of does. You are not rock stars. Okay? Most of you are not rock stars.
- [06:48]
Jared Gruner
Ooh, Data driven insights, large language models. Oh, that's so rock roll.
- [06:53]
Fergus O'Carroll
It is, right?
- [06:54]
Jared Gruner
He gets it.
- [06:54]
Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah. I can't believe you corporate types are still calling each other rock stars.
- [07:00]
Eric Peterson
You're a rock star.
- [07:01]
Fergus O'Carroll
We're all rock stars.
- [07:03]
Jared Gruner
Ooh, look at my data driven ins. Excellence on the rockstar.
- [07:06]
Fergus O'Carroll
Great job putting finance HR on one platform with Workday.
- [07:11]
Eric Peterson
Thank you, guys.
- [07:12]
Fergus O'Carroll
Can you keep me down?
- [07:12]
Tim
I'm working.
- [07:14]
Fergus O'Carroll
You people are.
- [07:17]
Eric Peterson
Hand over the air guitar.
- [07:24]
Jared Gruner
I've got another one.
- [07:27]
Fergus O'Carroll
This is almost b. To see to be in a way, weirdly, in a weird kind of way, Eric. But it's, it's, it's always fun to do these brands because they can really allow you to touch every surface of the brand, which I've always been excited by. Eric, does that make sense to you at all in how I'm describing the opportunity in this space?
- [07:47]
Tim
Yeah, Fergus, it does. We speak to a very challenging audience to reach. These are business decision makers, are C suite. You know, they're very, very busy people. Right. They're well compensated. They have a lot going on and, you know, it can be challenging to reach them and, and make an impact on their mindset. So it was, it was an enormous Challenge for sure.
- [08:22]
Fergus O'Carroll
And it's always interesting because I think there's a lot of conversation going on recently, a lot more conversation going on about bringing some of the, some of the dimensions that are really prevalent in business to consumer advertising, which are being more emotive, being more human, being more distinct. And these are factors that are now finding their way into business to business advertising, which has sorely needed it. I've quoted often the brilliant ad that Greg Hahn did while he was at Fallon in Minneapolis for eds Herding Cats. Herding Cats was an example of just a brilliant B2B ad for EDS, which was basically selling a software type solution back in the day that I think was, is what we're beginning to see more often. And we're seeing here in this case study which is bringing distinction and bringing emotion into business to business advertising.
- [09:26]
Tim
Yeah, it's funny you cite that. We actually used that when we first met with Ogilvy and we're talking about the challenge of, of the Super Bowl. And you're absolutely right. I think for too long marketers looked at B2B and said, oh well, we're speaking to a business, we must be rational and we must give them proof points and RTBs. And it's like, wait a minute, for our space, our entrenched competition behaved as these very monolithic, opaque companies. And we wanted to bring a real humanity to the work that we were doing. And I think it was built into work DNA from the very beginning when we were launched, and we were launched as Human Capital Management Solutions, as an HR solutions company. And so we really had that humanity ingrained in the company from the very beginning.
- [10:20]
Fergus O'Carroll
Another brilliant one, Jared, was a spot from ge, which I think Greg Hahn also worked on at BBDO when he switched over to bbdo. The hammer mallet spots that they did for ge, which was, you know, the parents are sitting down in the living room with their son. But it's a brilliant human story that's really about this massive industrial company communicating in a really human way. So you were at Ogilvy when this campaign was birthed, if that's even a word.
- [10:57]
Eric Peterson
Yes, I was.
- [10:58]
Fergus O'Carroll
Tell us about those, tell us about those conversations in the early days, working with Workday, this idea of a more human, entertaining approach.
- [11:07]
Eric Peterson
Yeah, And I'll be honest, they, they were already there when we met, when we met Workday. And I think it comes from their HR backgrounds. Right. So they understood the importance of emotion, they understood the importance of humor. I think a lot of that actually comes from their CEO and founder Who I think, you know, portrays and conveys that same kind of, that same kind of attitude. So that was actually not the push that Workday needed to get to this idea. They were already there. I think a lot of the pushes had to do with how do you come up with a bigger idea that scales? How do you make sure that it's global, that it's long term and how do you really act like no one is paying attention to you?
- [11:54]
Fergus O'Carroll
Tell us about Workday, like what it is that you do.
- [11:59]
Tim
Workday is a cloud based platform and when we launched that was really a unique positioning in the marketplace. We were competing with those on premise installed companies like Oracle and SAP. And so we provide our customers with human capital management solutions that help them to manage their workforce and include tasks like payroll, benefits, administration. You've got employee learning, performance management and then really basic things like time tracking and expenses. And then on the finance side, right, we provide a suite of applications for financial tasks like accounting and budgeting, financial reporting. It really is a full suite for our customers to manage their money and their people.
- [12:46]
Fergus O'Carroll
I always remember Workday when it came on. It came on with big investments in sports sponsorships. I remember being associated with golf. It came on really strong and scaled up and you guys made an awful lot of inroads in particularly in HR as sort of a beachhead for how you guys found your, found your grip in the early days and you built a significant share there. Were you competing against the saps and the Oracles when you were in HR or was it a different competitive set?
- [13:20]
Tim
Yeah, no, great question. We were originally founded with this notion that we were going to be cloud based when a lot of our entrenched competition was very on premise. And so this was a new idea at the time. HR Solutions was what we launched with. And yeah, our competition, depending on the country, depending on the size of the company, was certainly those Oracles and saps. But there were a lot of other competitors as well. Microsoft Dynamics, netsuite and there were other smaller competitors too as we go to smaller size companies. Everything from say a Ripple or Bamboo. Yeah, initially we were HR only and we started to launch finance solutions about four years ago, years later. And so we had to make this shift and it continued even as recently as, you know, the past few years where there was a lot of mindset that Workday was an HR solutions provider and a lot of our audience wasn't aware that we also provided finance. So that was something that over the past several years we focused on to correct.
- [14:23]
Fergus O'Carroll
So yeah, Before I jump in with to Jared on this, I want to follow up, Eric, because right before the call, when I was preparing, I was thinking, you know, I wonder if there are significant switching costs in place that make it really difficult for you guys to dislodge a competitor. I mean, you know, the way, you know, like I have all of my X data sources with X company and geez, if I've got to switch all of that, is there a risk that I'm going to lose contact with other parts of the ecosystem that I'm also accessed into? It's a classic Google play, right? You've got everything on Google. So you can't pull out one component without pulling out everything. And there's risks in doing that. Do you face that same risk in terms of a sort of a switching hurdle as a challenge for you when you're trying to gain share, or is it a pretty easy transition?
- [15:19]
Tim
No. Once again, you really dialed into the challenge. Absolutely. To go in and convince a company to switch out is incredibly difficult process for most companies to go through. Through. You think about yourself and switching banks, right? It's a reason it's incredibly difficult. It's very sticky. And so now you scale that up to, you know, say a Fortune 500 company. It's a massive hurdle for sure. So we've got to go in there, we've got to show them that we've done this successfully for other customers. That's why, you know, we, we leverage a lot of our wonderful case studies.
- [15:56]
Fergus O'Carroll
We'll be right back. We're thrilled to be supported by the Fes. For over 55 years, Effie has been the global authority on marketing effectiveness. They lead the way with the largest, most prestigious marketing effectiveness awards across 125 markets worldwide. And their coveted EFFIE index ranks the most effective brands, marketers and agencies globally. But EFFIE is more than awards. They're dedicated to helping all marketers, from seasoned CMOs to those just getting started, understand what makes marketing effective by equipping them with insights, tools and inspiration they need to succeed. Learn more@effie.org that's E-F-F-I-E.org. now back to the show. So, Jared, sorry for that. Sorry for keeping you over by the fence there for a while. Now we're going to dig into Jared's work. Thank you, man. So where does this all start for you? What's the, what's the first meeting and what's the ask from the client?
- [17:03]
Eric Peterson
So, I mean, there was a Super bowl brief that was laid out before us. And I would say, you know, the planning part probably goes back two years before that.
- [17:19]
Fergus O'Carroll
Which year are we talking about for the.
- [17:21]
Eric Peterson
So the super bowl brief came down in summer of 2022. We started working. Ogilvy started working with Workday 2019. And one of the first things that we had done once we were on board was interrogate the amount of money they were spending on marketing. They were competing with SAP and Oracle, but they were being vastly outspent. I think we all knew intuitively that they had to increase their spend, but no one had yet made the argument as to how much they should be spending and why. And really making that, that presentation to their executive management team, that was one of the first things that we had done and that, you know, that was successful. We were able to radically increase the amount of money that we were spending on marketing. And I think if we had not done that two years before this brief, we would not have gotten this brief in the first place.
- [18:20]
Fergus O'Carroll
And so I got super curious about that because how did you, in simple terms, how did you make that case? Because that's a case that many agencies and services providers to brands want to be able to make. Was there anything that you learned in that process that would be useful for others to learn about how you made the case for increased spend? Because, you know, most of the times it wants to go the other way.
- [18:43]
Eric Peterson
Yeah, no, I would love to take credit and say that it was my brilliance, but one of the benefits of Ogilvy is that there is a group called Ogilvy Consulting, which is essentially our in house management consultants. And so, you know, to put it bluntly, they're building a model and working with Workday's management team to really create that case.
- [19:05]
Fergus O'Carroll
Okay. Okay, good to know. So there's an agreement, Matt, to increase the spend. And one of the things that's been talked about a lot in the industry these days now is the fact that a stronger creative work creates business effects faster than average quality work. And in essence, what that means is it costs you less. You've got to spend more to create the business effects with work that is considered average because it has to be in market longer to create impact. Whereas the more creative work, more distinctive work, gets to those business results faster and therefore it saves you money. Was that part of your conversation at all? Because you, you, you took them into a very different creative territory.
- [19:51]
Eric Peterson
Yeah, we, I think at the time we were doing this because it's, it's, it's Lesbana and Adam Morgan who are talking about the, the cost of being dull. Right. So we were, we weren't using that language yet, but yes, we were absolutely having that conversation. And again, I think Workday was already there. I think they realized the power of creativity. But you know, an interesting thing had happened where they had said to us around 2022, we want to start creating award winning work. Right. I think before that we were creating funny work, we were creating cute work. It was working really well on the brand health tracker, but you know, music to our ears. They wanted to create award winning work. And so something that myself and my creative counterpart, Lisa Bright, we had developed like a Creative Council, right, Where we wanted to have a conversation with Workday around. What does that actually look like? What does that mean? What's the work that we should be looking at that we should be inspired by? Let's debate what's good and what's not good and let's really, if we're going to create this kind of work, we need to have a culture of creativity. And so that was, we actually had had that first Creative Council the very same day that Workday gave us the super bowl brief.
- [21:15]
Fergus O'Carroll
So, Eric, that just to follow up on that point, most marketers are afraid to put that as an aspiration because they feel it's sort of a vacuous thing that's about self aggrandizement rather than business results. Why were you asking for award winning work? Was there something about it that you felt would get you faster to someplace?
- [21:40]
Tim
Yeah, absolutely. And Jared's 100% right. We embraced the idea of award winning work. We knew that the costs were the same. You can produce a campaign that is mediocre for the same price as producing one that's fantastically brilliant and award winning. And we've seen multiple, multiple studies from the ipa, for example, that show that the returns on high performing creativity in your work is much greater than poor creative work. We knew that there was value not only to the business in terms of interest, awareness of your brand, familiarity, consideration, but also in attracting the most talented people in the industry to Workday. You know, it really was a force multiplier in that regard.
- [22:32]
Fergus O'Carroll
So Jared, how would you describe the business challenge that that Workday faced at that time? This is back in 2019 when you guys started with them and had. And had that evolved to something different by 2022.
- [22:46]
Eric Peterson
Yeah, in. I mean by 2022, because we had a weird couple years, right, where you have the pandemic and that actually spikes the increase for SaaS platforms, right? Suddenly a cloud native brand like Workday is doing quite well. But before that and after that you start to see, as you mentioned before, that organic growth is starting to slow. And so we knew that we needed to reverse that trend and we really had to expand the appeal of Workday. Now we had been saying the finance and HR platform for a changing world for a couple of years. So it's not like we had been ignoring finance, but we knew that we needed to do something radically different to really get people to pay attention to us in a different kind of way.
- [23:40]
Fergus O'Carroll
Why had Workday not taken off in finance departments?
- [23:44]
Eric Peterson
Our HR audience and our finance audience are wired completely differently, right? Hr, they're people people, right. They love innovation, right? It's much more emotional. Your finance leaders that we were selling to are completely different. They are much more rational, much more risk averse and they're higher up on the food chain. Let's, let's face it, finances than hr. So I don't think they were looking at the software solutions that HR was using and thinking, oh, I need a piece of that. So we didn't, just because we had credibility with HR didn't mean we were going to be able to transfer that to finance Finance. I think the second thing was frankly there was a lack of investment and focus and consistency on promoting finance. Right. As something that, that Workday does. There were times, right in 21, 20, 22 where we had focused on it and you could see pretty quick lifts in our brand health tracker. And then again for, for various, I would say corporate strategic reasons, we would stop doing that and those numbers would sink right back down because we hadn't built it into the memory structure yet.
- [24:49]
Fergus O'Carroll
That, and so when you, when you're faced with this, this task, Jared, do you do. Because you just mentioned there that these, that sort of the psychology of different disciplines and practice areas are different. HR versus Finance. Did you do some planning work and was part of the objective of the campaign? The, the strategic objective was we need to break into finance. Was that sort of in the brief from the client point?
- [25:16]
Eric Peterson
It was. Until it wasn't. So the, the original super bowl brief was a finance oriented brief and it was actually after we had sold in the creative idea that Workday went back and said actually we're going back to finance and hr, not just finance. And that was because this was the idea needed to be adopted globally. And in some of Workday's more nascent market markets, they're still leading with hr. That's still, you know, their, their foot in the door. So we couldn't create something that was finance only. But to the planning question, I mean, we had shortly before this touched base with all of Workday's key audiences, we had done several long interviews with leaders in HR, leaders in finance, and also CIOs as well. Those are like basically the three heads that make to drive a lot of the business decisions for Workday.
- [26:13]
Fergus O'Carroll
So did the term rockstar come from planning or did that come from creative?
- [26:18]
Eric Peterson
That came from creative. And so I'll give you like a little bit of the story. So we had a bunch of the threads that we wanted to pull on or that we offered up to the creative team were surprising things about CFOs, right? And so it was like, we think about CFOs, we think of them as like the person who always says no, right? They're. They're always the person who's telling you you can't spend that money, right? They're delivering bad news. But we had learned that, like, they don't like being the, the Debbie Downer of the business, right? They actually want to say yes. They want to do the things that, that, you know, get the company excited, but oftentimes they can't justify it, so they're often blamed and they're not celebrated. We had been kicking around the idea of Rockstar for, you know, before the super bowl brief, right? I remember conversations around, how do we do that? But, you know, I think we've probably all seen kind of tongue in cheek rock star campaigns where you show. I remember, I think HP had shown their engineers as rock stars. So, like, that on its own was not an original thought. And I think we, we honestly thought that kind of work was, was not great. We didn't want to do that. And so it wasn't the Rockstar thing that even got us excited. There was a. So the one of the members of the creative team and I think this was. We had Chris Turner, Christine Mont Killa, and Dave Lowe were kind of like the core creative team working on this idea. And I believe it was Dave who had said, you know, there's like, we kind of bandy around this term rock star, corporate rock star, but no one's ever actually asked what real rock stars think of that. And that was the turn, right? That was the thing that took this Rockstar idea and was like, oh, that's fresh. No one's done that. And there's an edge to that that got us excited.
- [28:17]
Fergus O'Carroll
Eric, what's happening on your side of the table during this process? Of developing the ideas. Was there a strategy document that you had to initially buy into, a brief, a creative brief? Or was it conversations? Or what was the. The. What was the flow of all of that for you?
- [28:33]
Tim
These guys had this brilliant insight, right? They tapped into cultural zeitgeist, like Jared noted, where, you know, across business. And we investigated this across business, not only in the U.S. you know, Canada, but also Emea. You know, this idea that in the corporate world, when somebody does a great job, you call them a rock star. And it's everywhere, right? There's podcasts about it, there's articles about it. So this idea that we're celebrating, these people, calling them out as rock stars was very much something that everybody could relate to. But then they took that twist, that one brilliant moment where they said, but how would. Really. How would real rock stars feel about this? Which was really brilliant. We saw them, we said, oh, that's fresh, that's new.
- [29:29]
Fergus O'Carroll
You guys not only did what a lot of super bowl spots do, which is they leverage a celebrity, and you decided to leverage, like, ten of them in this spot.
- [29:41]
Tim
It was only five, but I'm glad.
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Fergus O'Carroll
I mean, from. From my count, it was Billy Idol, Ozzie Osborne, Gwen Stefani, Travis Barker, that dude from Kiss, and I love rock and roll. I've forgotten her name. What's her name?
- [29:58]
Eric Peterson
Joan Jatt.
- [29:58]
Fergus O'Carroll
Joan Jatt. I was curious, guys. A lot of. And a bunch of others.
- [30:04]
Tim
Yeah, yeah. Gary Carr Jr. There were others.
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Fergus O'Carroll
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was thinking, why. Why Ozzy? Why Joan Jatt? Why Kiss? Was that because you were targeting a certain demographic and you needed to make sure that they could relate to the rock stars of their day?
- [30:21]
Tim
Absolutely. We spent an enormous amount of time with Ogilvy and speaking, of course, with the talent management teams. But, yeah, you summarized it well, Fergus. I think we needed this audience, this C suite audience and their influencers to instantly look at this talent and say, oh, rockstar. It had to be a quick read because they knew them, they knew their history, they could relate to them. They were familiar with their music. In some cases, like with Travis Barker or Gary Clark Jr. We put their talent on display. They had Travis drumming or Gary Clark Jr. Jamming. But, yeah, they had to read instantly as rock stars.
- [31:12]
Fergus O'Carroll
We're gonna drop the super bowl spot into this track since it has a good audio track on it.
- [31:19]
Tim
Hey, corporate types, would you stop calling each other rock stars? You're a rock star.
- [31:24]
Fergus O'Carroll
You are a rock star.
- [31:25]
Tim
Rock stars, please.
- [31:26]
Fergus O'Carroll
You know what it takes to be a rock star?
- [31:29]
Jared Gruner
I'VE trashed hotel rooms in 43 countries. I was on the road since I was 16. I've done my share of bad things. Also your share about things.
- [31:38]
Fergus O'Carroll
We know that using workday for finance.
- [31:40]
Tim
And HR makes you great at your job.
- [31:42]
Fergus O'Carroll
That don't make you a rock star.
- [31:46]
Jared Gruner
Oh, Ted, in finance you're a rock star.
- [31:49]
Eric Peterson
Hey, Liz, in hr can you do this?
- [31:53]
Jared Gruner
Unless you work with an actual rock.
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Tim
Star, you are a rock star.
- [31:57]
Fergus O'Carroll
Thank you.
- [31:58]
Tim
Who's a new guy?
- [32:01]
Jared Gruner
Hi, I'm Oswald.
- [32:03]
Fergus O'Carroll
Hello, Oswald.
- [32:04]
Eric Peterson
Give it up for Pam. Pam, you are a rock star. I wasn't gonna say it.
- [32:17]
Fergus O'Carroll
So where did you want to take it after the Super Bowl? And then were you tracking this in terms of its impact on the financial or finance department, the finance specialty? And what were you seeing?
- [32:31]
Tim
We loved it. We wanted to really extend it. They produced creative content across all of the channels. We had massive out of home installations in countries across the world that reflected, like Jared was saying, that vintage Fillmore poster style. And then they also produced short edits, 6 second edits, 15 second edits that ran in paid social channels.
- [33:04]
Eric Peterson
Couple things, Fergus, you know, we're, we're talking about the different celebrities, right? So when you see Gwen Stefan or Travis Barker, that those actually weren't part of the original launch. That's work that we created kind of in the next year. So it's not part of the Effie case, but it's part of how we've extended it. But to me, one of the coolest things that the team has done is created this, this tour bus, right, which is really a sales tool, right? It's an entertainment tool for their sales teams and prospective clients and current customers. And so you really see this is not just an advertising idea, which I know is something that ad agencies love to say all the time, but you're seeing this adopted throughout Workday's organization. And so a big part of our results was actually driving sales leads, right? It's not just perception, it's not just pricing. It is really driving sales leads that their teams are going to convert. And it being used as a sales tool to me is one of the most interesting, exciting things about this idea.
- [34:09]
Fergus O'Carroll
So what were you doing? What was the bus doing? Where did it go? Travel around the country or what?
- [34:14]
Tim
Yeah, you've got it. Yeah. Right. Think about how challenging it is to get these business decision makers, these C suite officers, to headquarters, to your customer experience center. You spend a lot of money on it and it's challenging to get them there. They're Very busy people. What if you said to them, hey, we can bring that to you? And so you show up with this massive tour bus that's wrapped and it looks like a rockstar tour bus. It's the Forever Ford Tour, and it's featuring Billy Idol right on the outside of the bus. And it pulls into your parking lot of your headquarters, and it's towing an Airstream trailer, which opens up and it's serving food and beverages. It's playing music. You've got cornhole. You come onto the bus and you see workday customer products like Sonos, like Aesop high end soaps. And you come on and you can watch case studies from other customers. You can have a demo perform for you. You can even record a podcast on the tour bus in an actual mobile podcast studio.
- [35:26]
Fergus O'Carroll
Dude, you got to send that bus to Chicago and you can take me around the country. I'll record this show every week on your bus.
- [35:34]
Tim
Oh, it has made its way coast to coast, pulled up in customer headquarters, and it actually showed up at our huge rising event, our annual customer event, Workday Rising. And it was there.
- [35:51]
Fergus O'Carroll
You know, one of the things that I think a lot of people would struggle with, given that this is a primarily, not primarily, it is a B2B campaign, how do you make the case for a Super bowl ad? Because the cost per targeted impression must be extraordinarily high and your decision makers are a very finite group and a very small percentage of the population. How did you to sort of deal with that discussion internally, Eric? And then how did you guys help him make that case? Jared?
- [36:24]
Tim
Yeah, you know, it's a great question. It's one we've been asked before. And I, I'll be completely transparent here. Look, we, we are founded by a couple of people who are real mavericks, right? Calculated risk takers. Anil Bushry and Dave Duffield and Anil co founder and he was the CEO at the time, now he's the chairman. And he said, look, look, I think we ought to do the Super Bowl. Let's challenge the agency and see what they come up with. So he from the beginning said, I want to do this now. We looked certainly at the metrics, we looked at the investment, the roi and built a case around it. And as you said, I mean, this is a really unique platform, right? You're reaching, I don't know, 110, 120 million people at one time, but it's got massive, massive, massive legs, right? It's going to have this afterlife and it's going to be Replayed online numerous times. And if it's good, it's going to be shared and you've got the PR extensions, but you got to do it right. Right. You're looking at all these polls, including the USA Today poll, and right, there's, I don't know, 65 spots that run. And you do not want to finish in the bottom half, the bottom third. You want to be in that top 10, which I'm proud to say we did finish in the top 10. But yeah, we're reaching not only our audience and their influencers, but also our employees. We've got 19,000 employees around the world who can amplify this. And so you've got all of these massive influencers. Right. Everybody now can promote and amplify something. Everyone has a voice through their social media platforms. And so I'm glad to say we did it right and we got massive amplifiers amplification and as a result put ourselves on the same, you know, level as much larger companies who had been around for a lot longer than us. But now we were in that conversation.
- [38:27]
Fergus O'Carroll
Anything you'd add to that, Jared?
- [38:29]
Eric Peterson
Yeah, we, I mean, this was, this was kind of the, the, the planary spiel at the beginning of the Versaprol presentation, right? Because I wasn't doing kind of like long drawn out, you know, insights for, for each of the ideas we ended up presenting. But this was, this was this wheel at the beginning. We knew that even though their founder was the one who had kind of challenged us, we knew there were skeptics within the marketing department who thought that this was probably not a smart use of money. And so, you know, the argument was really around a total audience approach. Right. We're not just reaching our, you know, know, end buyers. You're reaching current employees, you're reaching prospective employees, you're reaching the market, you're reaching consultants. Right?
- [39:16]
Fergus O'Carroll
Who, and you're, and you're reaching and you're, and you're reaching the current installed base.
- [39:22]
Tim
That's right.
- [39:23]
Fergus O'Carroll
Build the brand amongst people who are.
- [39:24]
Eric Peterson
Already using you completely and you're doing it alongside the most celebrated, famous, respected brand, you know, in the country, if not the world, which is going to make them look at workday in a different way. Right. Workday, I think, has always been, you know, kind of like the number three. Right. SAP and Oracle are the big guys and workday kind of could be a little bit of a risk, especially if you're going into, to finance. And so by putting ourselves next to other great blue chip brands, we're Also, you know, conveying and projecting this idea that we are, are a big player meant to be taken really seriously.
- [40:04]
Fergus O'Carroll
So last question guys is what do you feel other marketers should take away from this case? It is a gold EFFIE winner and that's a big part of our partnership with the EFFIE organization to showcase these great examples. What could and should other marketers take away from it?
- [40:22]
Eric Peterson
Yeah, I, we talked about some of the obvious stuff up top, right? B2B is not just rational, it's emotional. We talked about B2B, you know, to be funny, right. Needs to be distinctive. I think, I think we all intuitively know this. I think that to me the most surprising thing, maybe for other marketers goes to the notion that awards can actually create really valuable internal change. Right. Because you had asked earlier Fergus around, you know, sometimes, you know, awards work can feel kind of like navel gazing, self aggrandizing, right? Not driving the business, business. There was something that, you know, by focusing on creativity and wanting to actually create a case, it actually changed how we measured success. So for years we had been trying to connect essentially brand to demand measurement and for various reasons had been running into obstacles. And it was always my nightmare that, you know, so the workday CFO is going to say, what have we gotten for the tens of million dollars that we've spent? And we were going to talk about perception data. This process, right, of knowing we wanted to create a case study actually forced us to connect what the brand work means versus the sales lead, potential revenue. And that was, I think if it were not for the goal of really wanting to hold ourselves accountable, we still might not have gotten there. And so I think, you know, again, awards, are they good or they're bad? I mean, I think that's going to change from organization to organization. But in our case, it really helped us make, make us more accountable.
- [42:05]
Fergus O'Carroll
So were you able to sort of demonstrate that more performance based marketing aspect of it, Eric? Was there leads that were generated, was there business that was converted and share that was stolen or achieved?
- [42:20]
Tim
Yeah, absolutely. We are a very performance based organization. Our new cmo, Emma Chalwin comes from that type of organization and she ensured that we've become very focused on that. And as Jared said, we need to demonstrate roi. We need to focus on driving brand to demand to advocacy throughout our organization. Our CEO Carl Aschenbach preaches that to us. And so it's become something that's very important to and we have numerous analytics now in place where we can measure.
- [42:52]
Fergus O'Carroll
That kind of performance it is Eric Peterson. He is senior director, global advertising strategy and operations at Workday in San Francisco. And it is Jared Gruner, he is the founder of Zarafyte, it is a consultancy in Los Angeles. Great to have both of you on the show today and great work from Workday and congratulations on your fe. Awaits word.
- [43:15]
Tim
Thank you so much.
- [43:16]
Eric Peterson
Thank you, Burgess.
- [43:17]
Fergus O'Carroll
Honor to be here and we will see everyone on the next episode.