Tech & Data-Powered Campaign
Accenture: New York Covid Recovery Campaign
Awakening the city that slept, using a real-time data-powered campaign
Problem - Covid hit New York particularly hard. Accenture's new HQ was set to be a NY landmark, so they wanted to show their pride in the city by communicating how New York was coming back to life post-pandemic. They wanted to be the go-to ‘pulse check’ of the city and provider of good news stories information that could help people to re-engage with the city.
The Big Idea – Create the most authoritative picture of the city over time as it recovered from covid.
Creative Execution – A live-data-tool that measured the health of the city in real time and powered a data driven campaign that showed a fascinating picture of the city over time.
It began by creating the New York Recovery Radar data tool - a source of real-time Covid info.
Accenture wanted to be the go-to ‘pulse check’ of the city and provider of good news stories and information that could help people to re-engage with the city - and in turn, help kick start the economic recovery.
So, working with us, they developed a live-data-tool that measured the health of the city in real time - the data from this tool powered a real-time ever-evolving campaign that showed a true picture of the city over time, as it recovered from Covid.
I then developed a unique art direction specifically designed to show a picture of the city over time.
I commissioned a series of unique photographs which utilised a technique called ‘Time Slicing’ – this is a type of landscape photo that slices together multiple photos of a location taken over the course of 24 hours. The end result is a singular image which shows how a city might change over a space of time – exactly in keeping with this routes big idea – A picture of the city over time.
Hero Creative Assets
Accenture's brand stewards are notoriously strict, but given the scale and importance of this campaign, we were able to work together to develop a suite of brand assets that worked into the time slicing art direction – like graduated borders, backgrounds and overlays.
Landing pages and weekly industry-specific emailers positioned Accenture
as the pandemic
pulse-check of NY.
With an established art direction and a steady stream of data we launched a landing page that relied heavily on multi-media assets to give the user an engaging experience and a much more rounded understanding of how New York was recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic.
A modular structure allowed us to update the site regularly with new data, milestones and stories. We supplemented data with more human stories and qualitative ‘deep dives’. Weekly emails drove traffic to the page too.
We captured true sentiment data as the population emerged from lockdown (left).
We also wanted to include sentiment data to show what people were thinking on the ground, beyond the raw facts and figures, to really retain that human element - you can see some examples of that kind of post here.
And people shared their lockdown POV’s (right).
We had key Accenture personnel take a daily photograph out their apartment window during the campaign - essentially creating their own pictures of the city over time.
As the city recovered, the data reports kept everyone informed.
Recovery from the pandemic was never going to happen overnight - and the work didn’t stop when the lockdown ended. The data tool allowed us to continue to publish industry-specific documentation that gave everyone an accurate and up to date picture of the city over time.
I also used the data tool to power an OOH ABM style campaign.
One of the more interesting ways to use the data from the data tool, was to use it to create compelling ABM style out-of-home ads directed to diamond prospects around New York.
We could target customers (like McDonalds pictured here) with insightful messages from our data sets - an ad like this that talks about how 25% of people wanted to go to McDonalds as soon as the lockdown ended - could be placed directly outside McDonalds New York headquarters thanks to a smart media buy.
All that data led to…
++++++
A QUANTIFIABLE increase in positive sentiment towards Accenture as the pandemic continued.
Thousands
of views of the online materials by New York business owners who relied on the validity of the data to steer their business through the pandemic.
Dozens
of ultra-high-value sales leads for the sales teams as a direct result of exposure to the New York recovery campaign.